Stendhal Quotes
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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.
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There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.
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A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.
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Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.
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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?
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The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage.
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Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.
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A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.
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There is no such thing as "natural law": this expression is nothing but old nonsense... Prior to laws, what is natural is only the strength of the lion, or the need of the creature suffering from hunger or cold, in short, need.
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Every true passion thinks only of itself.
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War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon's proclamations.
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Love is a well from which we can drink only as much as we have put in, and the stars that shine from it are only our eyes looking in.
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If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion.
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Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us.
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It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.
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Only great minds can afford a simple style.
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It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
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It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover.
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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.
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She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?
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Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
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A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.
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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.
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Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.
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But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.
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A woman of generous character will sacrifice her life a thousand times over for her lover, but will break with him for ever over a question of pride.
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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.
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To describe happiness is to diminish it.
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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.
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I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.
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