Best 130 quotes of Stendhal on MyQuotes

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

Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought, it is itself reared only upon a structure of thought.

Love is a well from which we can drink only as much as we have put in, and the stars that shine from it are only our eyes looking in.

Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will. ... there are no age limits for love.

Love is like fever; it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process.

Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

Napoleon was indeed the man sent by God to help the youth of France! Who is to take his place?

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

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

Now that the steam engine rules the world, a title is an absurdity, still I am all dressed up in this title. It will crush me if Ido not support it. The title attracts attention to myself.

On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.

One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.

...one of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds.

Only great minds can afford a simple style.

People are less self-conscious in the intimacy of family life and during the anxiety of a great sorrow. The dazzling varnish of anextreme politeness is then less in evidence, and the true qualities of the heart regain their proper proportions.

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

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.

Perhaps men who cannot love passionately are those who feel the effect of beauty most keenly; at any rate this is the strongest impression women can make on them.

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

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.

Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.

Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.

Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.

Signs cannot be represented, in a spy's report, so damningly as words.

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.

Spring appears and we are once more children.

The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage.

The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world

The first characteristic of Rossini's music is speed - a speed which removes from the soul all the sombre emotions that are so powerfully evoked within us by the slow strains in Mozart. I find also in Rossini a cool freshness, which, measure by measure, makes us smile with delight.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The only unhappiness is a life of boredom.

The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.

The pleasures and the cares of the luckiest ambition, even of limitless power, are nothing next to the intimate happiness that tenderness and love give. I am man before being a prince, and when I have the good fortune to be in love, my mistress addresses a man and not a prince.

The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.

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.

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

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

The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.

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.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

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

This religion takes away the courage of thinking of unusual things and prohibits self-examination above all as the most egregiousof sins.... It is one step away from protestantism.

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

To describe happiness is to diminish it.

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.