Stendhal
Marie-Henri Beyle (January 23, 1783 – March 23, 1842), better known by his penname Stendhal, was a 19th century French writer.
Found 22 thoughts of Stendhal
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.
Stendhal
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
Stendhal
Beauty is the promise of happiness.
Stendhal
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.
Stendhal
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
Stendhal
Only great minds can afford a simple style.
Stendhal
The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.
Stendhal
Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing?
Stendhal
A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.
Stendhal
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.
Stendhal
One can acquire everything in solitude - except character.
Stendhal
To describe happiness is to diminish it.
Stendhal
Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.
Stendhal
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.
Stendhal
To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.
Stendhal
All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
Stendhal
A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.
Stendhal
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.
Stendhal
If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.
Stendhal
The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.
Stendhal
This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
Stendhal
The only excuse for God is that he doesn't exist.
Stendhal
