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Only great minds can afford a simple style.

Stendhal

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Stendhal
Age: 59 †
Born: 1783
Born: January 23
Died: 1842
Died: March 23
Autobiographer
Biographer
Diarist
Novelist
Writer
Marie-Henri Beyle
Henri Beyle
Simple
Great
Mind
Afford
Simplicity
Minds
Fashion
Style

More quotes by Stendhal

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Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
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The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.
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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.
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I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing.
Stendhal
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Love has always been the most important business in my life I should say the only one.
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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.
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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
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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
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Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.
Stendhal
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She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?
Stendhal
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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
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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
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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
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When you want to court a woman, court her sister first
Stendhal
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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
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If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.
Stendhal
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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
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To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You're supposed to seem bored.
Stendhal
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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
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The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
Stendhal