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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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Stendhal
Age: 59 †
Born: 1783
Born: January 23
Died: 1842
Died: March 23
Autobiographer
Biographer
Diarist
Novelist
Writer
Marie-Henri Beyle
Henri Beyle
Action
Giving
Thing
Men
Conceivable
Refuse
Gives
Pleasure
Free
More quotes by Stendhal
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
Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us.
Stendhal
When intimacy followed love in Italy there were no longer any vain pretensions between two lovers.
Stendhal
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
This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
Stendhal
Signs cannot be represented, in a spy's report, so damningly as words.
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
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
The first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers - is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.
Stendhal
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
Stendhal
Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing?
Stendhal
The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.
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
Only great minds can afford a simple style.
Stendhal
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.
Stendhal
The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world
Stendhal
If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion.
Stendhal
After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.
Stendhal
I do not feel I have wisdom enough yet to love what is ugly.
Stendhal
One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.
Stendhal
