Stendhal Quotes

There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.

The footman burst in, announcing, 'Monsieur le Duc de
.'
'Hold your tongue, you fool,' said the Duke as he entered the room. He said this so well, and with such majesty than Julien could not help thinking that knowing how to lose his temper with a footman was the whole extent of this great personage's knowledge.

These gentlemen, although of the highest nobility,' thought Julien, 'are not in the least boring like the people who come to dine with M. de La Mole; and I can see why,' he added a moment later,'they are not ashamed to be indecent.

The idea of most use to tyrants is that of God,

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.

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.

Without patience, without absence of anger, no one can be called a politician.

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.

Love is a beautiful flower, but we must be brave enough to pick her up from the edge of a precipice.

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.

But passion most dissembles, yet betrays, Even by its darkness; as the blackest sky Foretells the heaviest tempest. Don Juan, I. 73

The suspicion that a rival is loved is painful enough already, but to have the love that he inspires in her confessed to one in detail by the woman whom one adores is without doubt the acme of suffering.

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.

Am I capable of deceiving my friend? Julien asked himself peevishly. This being, for whom hypocrisy and an absence of all sympathy were the usual methods of protecting himself, could not bear, this time, the thought of the slightest trickiness in dealing with a man for whom he had friendly feelings.

On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.

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

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

Such are death, life, eternity- simple phenomena for those with organs of sense vast enough to comprehend them...

When you want to court a woman, court her sister first

It was the destiny of Napoleon - would it one day be his?

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

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.

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

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

I see but one rule: to be clear.

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 first instrument of a people's genius is its language.

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

I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.

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.

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

Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.

In Paris, Julien's position with regard to Madame de Renal would very soon have been simplified; but in Paris love is the child of the novels. The young tutor and his timid mistress would have found in three or four novels, and even in the lyrics of the Gymnase, a clear statement of their situation. The novels would have outlined for them the part to be played, shown them the model to copy; and this model, sooner or later, albeit without the slightest pleasure, and perhaps with reluctance, vanity would have compelled Julien to follow.

In a small town of the Aveyron or the Pyrenees, the slightest incident would have been made decisive by the ardour of the climate. Beneath our more sombre skies, a penniless young man, who is ambitious only because the refinement of his nature puts him in need of some of those pleasures which money provides, is in daily contact with a woman of thirty who is sincerely virtuous, occupied with her children, and never looks to novels for examples of conduct. Everything goes slowly, everything happens by degrees in the provinces: life is more natural.

Oh, if there were only a true religion. Fool that I am, I see a Gothic cathedral and venerable stained-glass windows, and my weak heart conjures up the priest to fit the scene. My soul would understand him, my soul has need of him. I only find a nincompoop with dirty hair.

He [Napoleon] had the defect of all parvenus -- that of having too great an opinion of the class into which he had risen.

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

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

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

It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors ofall the drawing-rooms in her face.

…All right, two mornings from now I'll fight a duel with a fellow known for his calm collectedness and remarkable skill…'Very remarkable,' said his Mephistophelian side. 'He never misses.

Since the time of Voltaire and two-chamber Government, which is at bottom simply distrust and personal self-examination, and gives the popular mind that bad habit of being suspicious, the Church of France seems to have realised that books are its real enemies.

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

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

A girl of sixteen had a complexion like a rose, and she put on rouge.

sound reasoning always gives offence. Julien's

I cannot provide the reality of events, I can only convey their shadow.

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.

A very small matter, when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it.

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

Misery destroys judgment.

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

If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us

Your water does not refresh me, said the thirsty genie. Yet it is the coolest well in all the Diar Bekir.

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.

Mathilde returned and strolled past the drawing-room windows; she saw him busily engaged in describing to Madame de Fervaques the old ruined castles that crown the steep banks of the Rhine and give them so distinctive a character. He was beginning to acquit himself none too badly in the use of the sentimental and picturesque language which is called wit in certain drawing-rooms.

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.

They were completely vague. They expressed everything and nothing. 'It is the Aeolian harp of style,' thought Julien. 'Amid the most lofty thoughts about annihilation, death, the infinite, etc., I can see no reality save a shocking fear of ridicule.

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

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

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?

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

On the other hand in America, in the Republic, one has to spend the whole weary day paying serious court to the shopkeepers in the street, and must become as stupid as they are; and there, one has no Opera.

Pendants have for two thousand years reiterated the notion that women have a more lively spirit, men more solidity; that women have more delicacy in their ideas and men greater power of attention. A Paris idler who once took a walk in the Versailles Gardens concluded that, judging from all he saw, the trees grow ready trimmed.

Our true passions are selfish.

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.

Exalted by a sentiment of which she was proud, and that overcame all her arrogance, she was reluctant to let a moment of her life go by without occupying it with some remarkable deed.

To write a book is to risk being shot at in public.

It seems that my destiny is to die dreaming.

The great drawback of being witty is that you have to keep your eyes fixed on the semi-idiots around you, and absorb their worthless sensations.

It is difficult to escape from the prevailing disease of one's generation.

The only real grounds for attack which the expression of Armance's countenance could offer to her enemies was a singular look which she had at times when her mind was most detached. This fixed and profound gaze was one of extreme attention; there was nothing in it, certainly, that could shock the most severe delicacy; it suggested neither coquetry nor assurance; but no one could deny that it was singular, and, in that respect, out of place in a young person. Madame de Bonnivet's flatterers, when they were sure of being noticed, would sometimes imitate this look, in discussing Armance among themselves; but these vulgar spirits robbed it of an element that they had never thought of noticing. "It is with such eyes," Madame de Mali-vert said to them one day, out of patience with their malevolence, "that a pair of angels exiled among men and obliged to disguise themselves in mortal form, would gaze at one another in mutual recognition.

Spring appears and we are once more children.

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.

Julien felt himself to be strong and resolute like a man who sees clearly into his own heart.

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

Old age is nothing but the absence of madness, the loss of illusion and passion.

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

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.

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

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

grotesque character of everyday occurrences conceals from one the real misery of passions. BARNAVE While

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.

Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.

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.

Prestige! Sir, is it nothing? To be revered by fools, gaped at by children, envied by the rich and scorned by the wise.

The presence of danger inspires a sensible man with genius, raising him, so to speak, above himself. In the case of the man of imagination, it inspires him with romances, which may indeed be bold, but which are frequently absurd.

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

An insane self-consciousness made him commit thousands of blunders.

What is this self, this I that I am? I know not. One fine day, I awoke to find myself upon this earth; I discovered my fate to be forever linked with a certain body, character, estate. Am I to spend all my days, then, ineffectually seeking to alter that which cannot be altered, and so, meanwhile, forget to live? Rather do I propose to accept myself as I am, humbly submitting to my own defects.

To the Happy Few!

There's one convenience about absolute power, that it sanctifies everything in the eyes of the people.

The only way of touching a heart is to wound it

They can only touch the heart by bruising it.

A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.

Leave me with my life of the imagination. Your petty pestering, your details of real life, which all upset me to some degree, would drag me down from heaven. Each person dies as best he may; my wish is not to think of death except in my own way.

It seemed to Julian that there was far too much hair in his wig.

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.

A good book is an event in my life.

What is really beautiful must always be true.

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