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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
It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century it is by shutting the doors ofall the drawing-rooms in her face.
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
A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
Stendhal
A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.
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
Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.
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
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
I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.
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
Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.
Stendhal
I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction, said Mathilde. It is the only thing which cannot be bought.
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
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
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
Love has always been the most important business in my life I should say the only one.
Stendhal
The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water.
Stendhal
The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world
Stendhal
The only unhappiness is a life of boredom.
Stendhal
One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.
Stendhal
