Quotes from 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.

Wit lasts no more than two centuries.

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

Since I am a man, my heart is three or four times less sensitive, because I have three or four times as much power of reason and experience of the world -- a thing which you women call hard-heartedness. As a man, I can take refuge in having mistresses. The more of them I have, and the greater the scandal, the more I acquire reputation and brilliance in society.

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.

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.

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

The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage.

To find love in Paris you must go down among those classes where the absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle for bare necessities, have allowed more energy to survive.

Our true passions are selfish.

It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.

The only unhappiness is a life of boredom.

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us.

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon's proclamations.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

One can acquire everything in solitude but character.

I do not feel I have wisdom enough yet to love what is ugly.

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

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

Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.

Perhaps men who cannot love passionately are those who feel the effect of beauty most keenly; at any rate this is the strongest impression women can make on them.

Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.