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.
STENDHALThe shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
More Stendhal Quotes
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Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us.
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The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
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Love is like fever; it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process.
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What is really beautiful must always be true.
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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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Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.
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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.
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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.
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Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
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It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.
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I call “crystallization” that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.
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A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.
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Signs cannot be represented, in a spy’s report, so damningly as words.
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But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.
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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