Quotes About Stendhal

There is a name for this sudden slap of art, this falling through the rabbit hole of civilisation. It's Stendhal's syndrome: being overcome by beauty. They say that the guards in the Uffizi are trained to deal with collapsing Americans who have lived lives of blameless comfort in Midwestern ugliness and can't compute the full beam of a Bronzino.

To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You're supposed to seem bored.

It is a great good fortune, as Stendhal said, for one "to have his passion as a profession.

Stendhal had said a Frenchman was an Italian in a bad mood.

A definition of beauty that more accurately summed up my feelings for Chloe was delivered by Stendhal. Beauty is the promise of happiness, he wrote, pointing to the way Chloe's face alluded to qualities I identified with a good life: there was humor in her nose, her freckles spoke of innocence, and her teeth suggested a casual, cheeky disregard for convention.

What is beauty, she thought, but the promise of happiness, as Stendhal said it was?

Perhaps I am even envious of Stendhal? He robbed me of the best atheist joke which precisely I could have made: 'God's only excuse is that he does not exist'...I myself have said somewhere: what hitherto been the greatest objection to existence? God ...

El amor-obsesión, el amor único, el verdadero amor, según Stendhal, sólo se da una vez en la vida, o a lo sumo en cada una de las etapas de la vida: infancia, adolescencia, juventud, madurez, vejez.

Estaba la teoría de Stendhal, de que el amor es un error. No es que a veces pueda errar, sino que por naturaleza es un error. El que ama se imagina perfecciones que no existen. Cuando esas fantasías desaparecen de la mente, cesa el amor. El amor no es ciego sino peor que ciego, es visionario, ve lo que no hay. A

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

I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing.

Christobel had warned me of Stendhal syndrome, the well-known condition affecting visitors to Florence who actually became ill from a surfeit of beauty, and on packing for Florence I had slipped in plenty of tissues.

There are authors who intigue me because of all I have heard and read about them, because their lives interest me, yet I cannot read their works. Stendhal is one, and the author of Tristram Shandy another. But perhaps the superb example in this respect is the Marquis de Sade.

De ahí que Stendhal, un espíritu impertinente, burlón, incluso odioso, se acercara más que muchos otros a la verdad al decir que «Lo bello no es sino la promesa de la felicidad». Sin duda esta definición sobrepasa su objetivo; somete lo bello al ideal infinitamente variable de la felicidad; despoja con excesiva ligereza lo bello de su carácter aristocrático; pero tiene el gran mérito de alejarse decididamente del error de los académicos.

the loneliness…the "inexpressibly delicious sensation of this memory - for as memories are older they're like wine rarer, till if you find a real old memory, one of infancy, not an established often tasted one but a brand new one, it would taste better than the Napoleon brandy Stendhal himself must have stared at…

Un giorno però era accaduto qualcosa. Essendomi capitato di leggere in uno dei taccuini stendhaliani queste parole isolate: "All lost, nothing lost", di colpo, come per miracolo, mi ero sentito libero, guarito. Avevo preso una cartolina, ci avevo scritto sopra la riga di Stendhal, quindi l'avevo spedita a Micòl, tale e quale, senza metterci niente, nemmeno la firma, ne pensasse pure quello che volesse. Tutto perduto, niente perduto. Come era vero! - mi dicevo -. E respiravo.

Stendhal syndrome, Angel says, is a medical term. It's when a painting, or any form of art, is so beautiful it overwhelms the viewer. It's a form of shock. When Stendhal toured the Church of Santa Croce in Florence in 1817, he reported almost fainting from joy. People feel rapid heart palpitations. They get dizzy. Looking at great art makes you forget your own name, forget even where you're at. It can bring on depression and physical exhaustion. Amnesia. Panic. Heart attack. Collapse.

According to Stendhal it takes about a year and a month to fall in love, all being well.

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

There is a certain well-known syndrome named after Stendhal in which one arrives in a place known from literature or art and experiences it so intensely that one grows weak or faints.