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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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Stendhal
Age: 59 †
Born: 1783
Born: January 23
Died: 1842
Died: March 23
Autobiographer
Biographer
Diarist
Novelist
Writer
Marie-Henri Beyle
Henri Beyle
Sometimes
Mirrors
Churned
Sky
Highway
Road
Skies
Blue
Mud
Novel
Highways
Eyes
Reflects
Eye
Passes
Others
Mirror
More quotes by 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.
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I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.
Stendhal
A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.
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On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.
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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
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
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
I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction, said Mathilde. It is the only thing which cannot be bought.
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She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?
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A good book is an event in my life.
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It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
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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.
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Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing?
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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.
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Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us.
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
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
Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.
Stendhal
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
Stendhal
A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
Stendhal
