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.
STENDHALThe first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
More Stendhal Quotes
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If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.
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Every true passion thinks only of itself.
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Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.
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One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
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When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.
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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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Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
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I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.
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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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In our calling, we have to choose; we must make our fortune either in this world or in the next, there is no middle way.
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People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story.
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To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.
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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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War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon’s proclamations.
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I do not feel I have wisdom enough yet to love what is ugly.
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