Stendhal quotes

Stendhal was a French writer, famous for his insightful and psychological novels such as "The Red and the Black" and "The Charterhouse of Parma." His works are celebrated for their realism, wit, and keen analysis of character motivations. He influenced generations of authors with his modern narrative style and deep exploration of human emotions. Here are 85 of his quotes:

One can acquire everything in solitude - except character.

Stendhal

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

Stendhal

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

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.

Stendhal

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

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

Only great minds can afford a simple style.

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.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

What is really beautiful must always be true.

Stendhal

Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.

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

This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.

Stendhal

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

Stendhal

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

Stendhal

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

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.

Stendhal

At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.

Stendhal