Stendhal Quotes - Page 3

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

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

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

A man who is half an idiot, but who keeps a sharp lookout and acts prudently all his life, often enjoys the pleasure of triumphing over men of more imagination than he

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

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

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.

A good book is an event in my life.

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.

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

Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

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 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.

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.

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.

Friendship has its illusions no less than love.