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.
STENDHALLove has always been the most important business in my life; I should say the only one.
More Stendhal Quotes
-
-
Now that the steam engine rules the world, a title is an absurdity, still I am all dressed up in this title. It will crush me if Ido not support it. The title attracts attention to myself.
STENDHAL -
I call “crystallization” that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.
STENDHAL -
An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.
STENDHAL -
I see but one rule: to be clear.
STENDHAL -
The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.
STENDHAL -
Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.
STENDHAL -
A woman of generous character will sacrifice her life a thousand times over for her lover, but will break with him for ever over a question of pride.
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.
STENDHAL -
I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.
STENDHAL -
Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.
STENDHAL -
The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.
STENDHAL -
In our calling, we have to choose; we must make our fortune either in this world or in the next, there is no middle way.
STENDHAL -
When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.
STENDHAL -
Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.
STENDHAL -
I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing.
STENDHAL -
The difference breeds hatred.
STENDHAL -
Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?
STENDHAL -
Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.
STENDHAL -
People are less self-conscious in the intimacy of family life and during the anxiety of a great sorrow. The dazzling varnish of an extreme politeness is then less in evidence, and the true qualities of the heart regain their proper proportions.
STENDHAL -
Signs cannot be represented, in a spy’s report, so damningly as words.
STENDHAL -
Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.
STENDHAL -
She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?
STENDHAL -
This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
STENDHAL -
A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader’s soul.
STENDHAL -
The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage.
STENDHAL -
Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.
STENDHAL