Stendhal quotes

“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

“Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery. ”

— Stendhal

“The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.”

— Stendhal

“Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore. ”

— Stendhal

“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. ”

— Stendhal