Quotes from Stendhal

The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.

The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.

Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit.

Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.

I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.

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

Love is like a fever which comes and goes quite independently of the will. ... there are no age limits for love.

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

Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.

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.

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.

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

She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?

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

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

When intimacy followed love in Italy there were no longer any vain pretensions between two lovers.

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

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

Only great minds can afford a simple style.

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness

Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit.

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

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.

The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.