Stendhal Quotes

Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.

The idea which tyrants find most useful is the idea of God.

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

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

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

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.

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

Only great minds can afford a simple style.

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.

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.

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

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.

Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit.

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.

Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.

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

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

To describe happiness is to diminish it.

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

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.