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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
Cold
Creature
Law
Nonsense
Suffering
Hunger
Natural
Laws
Nothing
Creatures
Need
Short
Prior
Needs
Expression
Lion
Thing
Strength
Lions
More quotes by Stendhal
I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction, said Mathilde. It is the only thing which cannot be bought.
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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.
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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 novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
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I call crystallization that action of the mind that discovers fresh perfections in its beloved at every turn of events.
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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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A good book is an event in my life.
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Every true passion thinks only of itself.
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Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I have a bad memory for facts.
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Love is like fever it comes and goes without the will having any part of the process.
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The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
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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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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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People are less self-conscious in the intimacy of family life and during the anxiety of a great sorrow. The dazzling varnish of anextreme politeness is then less in evidence, and the true qualities of the heart regain their proper proportions.
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Signs cannot be represented, in a spy's report, so damningly as words.
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Women prefer emotions to reasoning.
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