It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.
STENDHALAt a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.
More Stendhal Quotes
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Friendship has its illusions no less than love.
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In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives.
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The first virtue of a young man today – that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers – is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.
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If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.
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One of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds.
STENDHAL -
The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.
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The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.
STENDHAL -
It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover.
STENDHAL -
The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.
STENDHAL -
Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.
STENDHAL -
This religion takes away the courage of thinking of unusual things and prohibits self-examination above all as the most egregious of sins. It is one step away from protestantism.
STENDHAL -
This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
STENDHAL -
Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.
STENDHAL -
Every great action is extreme when it is undertaken. Only after it has been accomplished does it seem possible to those creatures of more common stuff.
STENDHAL -
Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.
STENDHAL -
Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.
STENDHAL -
Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life.
STENDHAL -
The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.
STENDHAL -
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
STENDHAL -
It is difficult to escape from the prevailing disease of one’s generation.
STENDHAL -
True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.
STENDHAL -
I call “crystallization” that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.
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People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story.
STENDHAL -
On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.
STENDHAL -
It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors ofall the drawing-rooms in her face.
STENDHAL -
Love is like fever; it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process.
STENDHAL