Best 130 quotes of Stendhal on MyQuotes

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

After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.

Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.

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

A melancholy air can never be the right thing; what you want is a bored air. If you are melancholy, it must be because you want something, there is something in which you have not succeeded. It is shewing your inferiority. If you are bored, on the other hand, it is the person who has tried in vain to please you who is inferior.

An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

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.

A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.

A strange effect of marriage, such as the nineteenth century has made it! The boredom of married life inevitably destroys love, when love has preceded marriage. And yet, as a philosopher has observed, it speedily brings about, among people who are rich enough not to have to work, an intense boredom with all quiet forms of enjoyment. And it is only dried up hearts, among women, that it does not predispose to love.

At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.

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

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

Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.

But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.

Chélan had acted as imprudently for Julien as he had for himself. He had given him the habit of reasoning correctly, and of not being put off by empty words, but he had neglected to tell him that this habit was a crime in the person of no importance, since every piece of logical reasoning is offensive.

Conversationis like the table of contents of a dull book.... All the greatest subjects of human thought are proudly displayedin it. Listen to it for three minutes, and you ask yourself which is more striking, the emphasis of the speaker or his shocking ignorance.

Every great action is extreme when it is undertaken. Only after it has been accomplished does it seem possible to those creatures of more common stuff.

Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life.

Far less envy in America than in France.

For the future, I shall rely only upon those elements of my character which I have tested. Who would ever have said that I should find pleasure in shedding tears? That I should love the man who proves to me that I am nothing more than a fool?

Friendship has its illusions no less than love.

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

Great ladies are no more spiteful than the average rich woman; but one acquires in their society a greater susceptibility, and feels more profoundly andmore irremediably, their unpleasant remarks.

I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.

I call "crystallization" that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.

If I meet the Christian Deity, I am lost: He is a tyrant and as such, is full of ideas of vengeance; His Bible speaks of nothing but fearful punishments. I never loved Him! I could never even believe that anyone did love Him sincerely. He is devoid of pity.... He will punish me in some abominable manner.

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

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

If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion.

I have a bad memory for facts.

I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.

Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?

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.

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.

I no longer find such pleasure in that preeminently good society, of which I was once so fond. It seems to me that beneath a cloak of clever talk it proscribes all energy, all originality. If you are not a copy, people accuse you of being ill-mannered.

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.

I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing.

I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction," said Mathilde. "It is the only thing which cannot be bought.

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.

It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.

It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover.

It is difficult to escape from the prevailing disease of one's generation.

It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest.

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

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.

I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.

Jean Jacques Rousseauis nothing but a fool in my eyes when he takes it upon himself to criticise society; he did not understand it, and approached it with the heart of an upstart flunkey.... For all his preaching a Republic and the overthrow of monarchical titles, the upstart is mad with joy if a Duke alters the course of his after-dinner stroll to accompany one of his friends.

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

Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.