Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.
STENDHALAny man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.
More Stendhal Quotes
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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.
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Every true passion thinks only of itself.
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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 more a race is governed by its passions, the less it has acquired the habit of cautious and reasoned argument, the more intense will be its love of music.
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Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.
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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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To find love in Paris you must go down among those classes where the absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle for bare necessities, have allowed more energy to survive.
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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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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.
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Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.
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The idea which tyrants find most useful is the idea of God.
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Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.
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Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?
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The only unhappiness is a life of boredom.
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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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A man who is half an idiot, but who keeps a sharp lookout and acts prudently all his life, often enjoys the pleasure of triumphing over men of more imagination than he.
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Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth.
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When intimacy followed love in Italy there were no longer any vain pretensions between two lovers.
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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.
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She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?
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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.
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One of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds.
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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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Friendship has its illusions no less than love.
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I do not feel I have wisdom enough yet to love what is ugly.
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Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.
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