Only great minds can afford a simple style.
Stendhal

Our true passions are selfish.
Stendhal

People happy in love have an air of intensity.
Stendhal

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

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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