All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
STENDHALLove is like fever; it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process.
More Stendhal Quotes
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In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives.
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Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.
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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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There 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.
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It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors ofall the drawing-rooms in her face.
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This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
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The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.
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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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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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Spring appears and we are once more children.
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Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.
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A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader’s soul.
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The idea which tyrants find most useful is the idea of God.
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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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The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
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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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I do not feel I have wisdom enough yet to love what is ugly.
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Only great minds can afford a simple style.
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Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.
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When intimacy followed love in Italy there were no longer any vain pretensions between two lovers.
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Our true passions are selfish.
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Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?
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A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.
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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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One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
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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