Stendhal Quotes - Page 5

Why not make an end of it all?... My life is a succession of griefs and bitter feelings.... What is death?... A very small matter,when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it.

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.

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.

To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You're supposed to seem bored.

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.

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

When intimacy followed love in Italy there were no longer any vain pretensions between two lovers.

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

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

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

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.

Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.

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

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?

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.

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

War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon's proclamations.

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.

The first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers - is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.

She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?

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

Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth.

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

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.

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.