Stendhal quotes

The only excuse for God is that He does not exist. (Stendhal)
One can acquire everything in solitude - except character. View quote
Stendhal
Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness. View quote
Stendhal
All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few. View quote
Stendhal
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. View quote
Stendhal
Love has always been the most important business in my life, I should say the only one. View quote
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. View quote
Stendhal
Only great minds can afford a simple style. View quote
Stendhal
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. View quote
Stendhal
Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all. View quote
Stendhal
Our true passions are selfish. (Stendhal)
A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness. View quote
Stendhal
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now. View quote
Stendhal
What is really beautiful must always be true. View quote
Stendhal
Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery. View quote
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. View quote
Stendhal
This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom. View quote
Stendhal
The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years. View quote
Stendhal
A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth. View quote
Stendhal
I call crystallization that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events. View quote
Stendhal
If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us. (Stendhal)
People happy in love have an air of intensity. View quote
Stendhal
Signs cannot be represented, in a spy's report, so damningly as words. View quote
Stendhal
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. View quote
Stendhal
At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight. View quote
Stendhal