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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
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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
Need
Short
Prior
Needs
Expression
Lion
Thing
Strength
Lions
Cold
Creature
Law
Nonsense
Suffering
Hunger
Natural
Laws
Nothing
Creatures
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A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
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The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
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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.
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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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Every true passion thinks only of itself.
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Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.
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The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.
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Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.
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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.
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The only unhappiness is a life of boredom.
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Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.
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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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It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest.
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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.
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...one of the traits of genius is not to drag its thought through the rut worn by vulgar minds.
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Only great minds can afford a simple style.
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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.
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Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.
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To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You're supposed to seem bored.
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