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I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing.
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
World
Crumbles
Rule
Clear
Nothing
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
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.
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A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader's soul.
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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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Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.
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.
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Only great minds can afford a simple style.
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A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
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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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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.
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The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse - as a luxury befitting a young man.
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When you want to court a woman, court her sister first
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Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.
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Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.
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.
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The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
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This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
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The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
Stendhal
...one of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds.
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
