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.
STENDHALThere is no such thing as “natural law”: this expression is nothing but old nonsense… Prior to laws, what is natural is only the strength of the lion, or the need of the creature suffering from hunger or cold, in short, need.
More Stendhal Quotes
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Why not make an end of it all? My life is a succession of griefs and bitter feelings. What is death? A very small matter, when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it.
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Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
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One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.
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Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.
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Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.
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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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Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.
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At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.
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She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?
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The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.
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Now that the steam engine rules the world, a title is an absurdity, still I am all dressed up in this title. It will crush me if Ido not support it. The title attracts attention to myself.
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Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.
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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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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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A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader’s soul.
STENDHAL