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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
Giving
Thing
Men
Conceivable
Refuse
Gives
Pleasure
Free
Action
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.
Stendhal
Great ladies are no more spiteful than the average rich woman but one acquires in their society a greater susceptibility, and feels more profoundly andmore irremediably, their unpleasant remarks.
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
Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.
Stendhal
People happy in love have an air of intensity.
Stendhal
Chélan had acted as imprudently for Julien as he had for himself. He had given him the habit of reasoning correctly, and of not being put off by empty words, but he had neglected to tell him that this habit was a crime in the person of no importance, since every piece of logical reasoning is offensive.
Stendhal
Sometimes the impact of Mozart's music is so immediate that the vision in the mind remains blurred and incomplete, while the soul seems to be directly invaded, drenched in wave upon wave of melancholy.
Stendhal
Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.
Stendhal
Love has always been the most important business in my life I should say the only one.
Stendhal
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
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
Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.
Stendhal
Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
Stendhal
The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.
Stendhal
The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.
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
Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth.
Stendhal
A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
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
Napoleon was indeed the man sent by God to help the youth of France! Who is to take his place?
Stendhal
