Stendhal quotes

“Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.”

— Stendhal

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

— Stendhal

“Our true passions are selfish.”

— Stendhal

“A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.”

— Stendhal

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

— Stendhal

“If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.”

— Stendhal

“People happy in love have an air of intensity.”

— Stendhal

“A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.”

— Stendhal

“Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.”

— Stendhal

“This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.”

— Stendhal

“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.”

— Stendhal

“All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.”

— Stendhal

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

— 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

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