The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.
STENDHALTo describe happiness is to diminish it.
More Stendhal Quotes
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When you want to court a woman, court her sister first
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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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Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.
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Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.
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I see but one rule: to be clear.
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When intimacy followed love in Italy there were no longer any vain pretensions between two lovers.
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A good book is an event in my life.
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Perhaps men who cannot love passionately are those who feel the effect of beauty most keenly; at any rate this is the strongest impression women can make on them.
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Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.
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It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest.
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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.
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One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
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The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world
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The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water.
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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.
STENDHAL