Quotes

“The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.” Stendhal

“Love has always been the most important business in my life, I should say the only one.” Stendhal

“Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.” Stendhal

“Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.” Stendhal

“Only great minds can afford a simple style.” Stendhal

“One can acquire everything in solitude except character.” Stendhal

“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.” Stendhal

“She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?” Stendhal

“If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.” Stendhal

“What is really beautiful must always be true.” Stendhal

“To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.” Stendhal

“A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.” Stendhal

“Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.” Stendhal

“To describe happiness is to diminish it.” Stendhal

“The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.” 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

“The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse - as a luxury befitting a young man.” 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 pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.” Stendhal

“Friendship has its illusions no less than love” Stendhal

“Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.” Stendhal

“God's only excuse is that he does not exist.” Stendhal

“Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.” Stendhal

“The more a race is governed by its passions, the less it has acquired the habit of cautious and reasoned argument, the more intense will be its love of music.” Stendhal

“Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.” Stendhal

“Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.” Stendhal

“The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.” Stendhal

“The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.” Stendhal

“It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.” Stendhal

“A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.” Stendhal