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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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To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You're supposed to seem bored.
Stendhal
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Napoleon was indeed the man sent by God to help the youth of France! Who is to take his place?
Stendhal
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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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One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.
Stendhal
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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
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If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion.
Stendhal
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When you want to court a woman, court her sister first
Stendhal
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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.
Stendhal
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I call crystallization that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.
Stendhal
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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
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Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.
Stendhal
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When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.
Stendhal
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Every great action is extreme when it is undertaken. Only after it has been accomplished does it seem possible to those creatures of more common stuff.
Stendhal
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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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She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?
Stendhal
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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
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I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.
Stendhal
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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
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A good book is an event in my life.
Stendhal
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After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.
Stendhal