Stendhal Quotes - Page 4

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

I have a bad memory for facts.

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

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.

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.

When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.

Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing?

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

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.

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.

On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.

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

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

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.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.