Stendhal Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

It seems that my destiny is to die dreaming.

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

A novel is a mirror travelling down the road.

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

He, at least, has no fear of bad taste.

It is something like love at first sight. An instant reveals to you what your heart had needed for a long time without recognizing it.

Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.

Feminine delicacy was carried to excess in Mme de Renal.

Want of exercise was beginning to affect his health and to give him the weak and excitable character of a young German student.

Misery destroys judgment.

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.

It is because I was foolish then that I am now wise. O philosopher who see nothing save in a flash, how short is your vision! Your eye is not made to follow the underground working of the passions. FRAU VON GOETHE This.

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.

Puns are incompatible with murder.