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.
STENDHALAny man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.
More Stendhal Quotes
-
-
What is really beautiful must always be true.
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 -
Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.
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 -
A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader’s soul.
STENDHAL -
Signs cannot be represented, in a spy’s report, so damningly as words.
STENDHAL -
In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future.
STENDHAL -
Women prefer emotions to reasoning.
STENDHAL -
It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.
STENDHAL -
Love is like fever; it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process.
STENDHAL -
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.
STENDHAL -
But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.
STENDHAL -
I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase.
STENDHAL -
The difference breeds hatred.
STENDHAL -
Great ladies are no more spiteful than the average rich woman; but one acquires in their society a greater susceptibility, and feels more profoundly andmore irremediably, their unpleasant remarks.
STENDHAL