"The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door."
Read quote
13 likes
Quote collection
Stendhal quotes (page 3 of 7)
133 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Power, after love, is the first source of happiness."
Read quote
13 likes
"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."
Read quote
13 likes
"Women prefer emotions to reasoning."
Read quote
13 likes
"The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly."
Read quote
12 likes
"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."
Read quote
12 likes
"A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth."
Read quote
11 likes
"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."
Read quote
11 likes
"The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent."
Read quote
11 likes
"Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life."
Read quote
11 likes
"Friendship has its illusions no less than love."
Read quote
11 likes
"When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily."
Read quote
11 likes
"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."
Read quote
10 likes
"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."
Read quote
10 likes
"Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity."
Read quote
10 likes
"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."
Read quote
10 likes
"What is really beautiful must always be true."
Read quote
9 likes
"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."
Read quote
9 likes
"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."
Read quote
9 likes
"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."
Read quote
9 likes