Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.
STENDHALOn a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.
More Stendhal Quotes
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To describe happiness is to diminish it.
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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.
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The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.
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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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Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
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Sometimes the impact of Mozart’s music is so immediate that the vision in the mind remains blurred and incomplete, while the soul seems to be directly invaded, drenched in wave upon wave of melancholy.
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The only unhappiness is a life of boredom.
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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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The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world
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Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.
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It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
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It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover.
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A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.
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Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.
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The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
STENDHAL






