110+ Stendhal Quotes On Mor, Romantic And Refined

Stendhal was a French writer, born Marie-Henri Beyle, in 1783. He is best known for his novels Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme, as well as his treatise on love, De l'amour. He was a pioneering realist, and is considered one of the earliest and most influential practitioners of the genre. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Stendhal on love, mor, romantic.

Top 10 Stendhal Quotes

1. She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?
2. One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
3. Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.
4. The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
5. A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.
6. A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.
7. Love is like fever; it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process.
8. God's only excuse is that he does not exist.
9. To describe happiness is to diminish it.
10. All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

Stendhal Image Quotes

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness. — Stendhal

Stendhal Short Quotes

• Only great minds can afford a simple style.
• On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.
• Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
• Every true passion thinks only of itself.
• This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
• If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion.
• Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.
• When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.
• Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.
• To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You're supposed to seem bored.

Stendhal Quotes About Love

I love her beauty, but I fear her mind. — Stendhal

The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning. — Stendhal

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

People happy in love have an air of intensity. — Stendhal

The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears. — Stendhal

To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face. — Stendhal

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

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

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. — Stendhal

Stendhal Quotes About Pleasure

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

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

The pleasures and the cares of the luckiest ambition, even of limitless power, are nothing next to the intimate happiness that tenderness and love give. I am man before being a prince, and when I have the good fortune to be in love, my mistress addresses a man and not a prince. — Stendhal

But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure. — Stendhal

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it. — Stendhal

A man who is half an idiot, but who keeps a sharp lookout and acts prudently all his life, often enjoys the pleasure of triumphing over men of more imagination than he — Stendhal

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. — Stendhal

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? — Stendhal

Stendhal Quotes About France

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

The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America. — Stendhal

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

Napoleon was indeed the man sent by God to help the youth of France! Who is to take his place? — Stendhal

Stendhal Quotes About People

People are less self-conscious in the intimacy of family life and during the anxiety of a great sorrow. The dazzling varnish of anextreme politeness is then less in evidence, and the true qualities of the heart regain their proper proportions. — Stendhal

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

The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world — Stendhal

Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things. — Stendhal

Stendhal Quotes About Life

Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained. — Stendhal

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

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door. — Stendhal

Why not make an end of it all?... My life is a succession of griefs and bitter feelings.... What is death?... A very small matter,when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it. — Stendhal

One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion. — Stendhal

The only unhappiness is a life of boredom. — Stendhal

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. — Stendhal

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

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

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

Stendhal Famous Quotes And Sayings

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness. — Stendhal

In our calling, we have to choose; we must make our fortune either in this world or in the next, there is no middle way. — Stendhal

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. — Stendhal

Conversationis like the table of contents of a dull book.... All the greatest subjects of human thought are proudly displayedin it. Listen to it for three minutes, and you ask yourself which is more striking, the emphasis of the speaker or his shocking ignorance. — Stendhal

Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore. — 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

What is really beautiful must always be true. — Stendhal

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. — Stendhal

Sometimes the impact of Mozart's music is so immediate that the vision in the mind remains blurred and incomplete, while the soul seems to be directly invaded, drenched in wave upon wave of melancholy. — Stendhal

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

Our true passions are selfish. — 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

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

The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief. — Stendhal

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

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. — Stendhal

It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest. — Stendhal

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. — Stendhal

If I meet the Christian Deity, I am lost: He is a tyrant and as such, is full of ideas of vengeance; His Bible speaks of nothing but fearful punishments. I never loved Him! I could never even believe that anyone did love Him sincerely. He is devoid of pity.... He will punish me in some abominable manner. — Stendhal

This religion takes away the courage of thinking of unusual things and prohibits self-examination above all as the most egregiousof sins.... It is one step away from protestantism. — Stendhal

I have a bad memory for facts. — Stendhal

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

Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch? — Stendhal

The first characteristic of Rossini's music is speed - a speed which removes from the soul all the sombre emotions that are so powerfully evoked within us by the slow strains in Mozart. I find also in Rossini a cool freshness, which, measure by measure, makes us smile with delight. — Stendhal

If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured. — Stendhal

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

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. — Stendhal

A melancholy air can never be the right thing; what you want is a bored air. If you are melancholy, it must be because you want something, there is something in which you have not succeeded. It is shewing your inferiority. If you are bored, on the other hand, it is the person who has tried in vain to please you who is inferior. — Stendhal

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. — Stendhal

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent. — Stendhal

...one of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds. — Stendhal

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

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

Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought, it is itself reared only upon a structure of thought. — Stendhal

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

Spring appears and we are once more children. — Stendhal

Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life. — Stendhal

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion. — Stendhal

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road. — Stendhal

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

Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness. — Stendhal

A novel is a mirror walking along a main road. — Stendhal

I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction," said Mathilde. "It is the only thing which cannot be bought. — Stendhal

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. — Stendhal

Friendship has its illusions no less than love. — Stendhal

Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert. — Stendhal

Jean Jacques Rousseauis nothing but a fool in my eyes when he takes it upon himself to criticise society; he did not understand it, and approached it with the heart of an upstart flunkey.... For all his preaching a Republic and the overthrow of monarchical titles, the upstart is mad with joy if a Duke alters the course of his after-dinner stroll to accompany one of his friends. — Stendhal

Women prefer emotions to reasoning. — Stendhal

Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth. — Stendhal

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. — Stendhal

I think no woman I have had ever gave me so sweet a moment, or at so light a price, as the moment I owe to a newly heard musical phrase. — Stendhal

Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels. — Stendhal

I see but one rule: to be clear. — Stendhal

Chélan had acted as imprudently for Julien as he had for himself. He had given him the habit of reasoning correctly, and of not being put off by empty words, but he had neglected to tell him that this habit was a crime in the person of no importance, since every piece of logical reasoning is offensive. — Stendhal

An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table. — Stendhal

The idea which tyrants find most useful is the idea of God. — Stendhal

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness. — Stendhal

If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us. — Stendhal

Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form. — Stendhal

Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar. — Stendhal

A very small matter, when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it. — Stendhal

Life Lessons by Stendhal

1. Stendhal believed that life should be lived to the fullest and that one should never be afraid to take risks in order to achieve their goals.
2. He also believed that life was too short to waste time on trivial matters and that it was important to focus on the things that truly mattered.
3. Finally, Stendhal encouraged people to be true to themselves and to never give up on their dreams, no matter how difficult the journey may be.