Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.
Stendhal
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Stendhal
Age: 59 †
Born: 1783
Born: January 23
Died: 1842
Died: March 23
Autobiographer
Biographer
Diarist
Novelist
Writer
Marie-Henri Beyle
Henri Beyle
Thing
Men
Conceivable
Refuse
Gives
Pleasure
Free
Action
Giving
More quotes by 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
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
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.
Stendhal
Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.
Stendhal
Signs cannot be represented, in a spy's report, so damningly as words.
Stendhal
Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.
Stendhal
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
Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.
Stendhal
Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.
Stendhal
It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest.
Stendhal
I call crystallization that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.
Stendhal
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
I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.
Stendhal
A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.
Stendhal
It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.
Stendhal
Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing?
Stendhal
Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
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
Women prefer emotions to reasoning.
Stendhal
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
Stendhal
