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If you want to be witty, work on your character and say what you think on every occasion.
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
Character
Work
Every
Think
Thinking
Occasion
Witty
Occasions
Tongue
More quotes by 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
Beauty is nothing but a promise of happiness.
Stendhal
Women prefer emotions to reasoning.
Stendhal
A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
Stendhal
It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest.
Stendhal
I no longer find such pleasure in that preeminently good society, of which I was once so fond. It seems to me that beneath a cloak of clever talk it proscribes all energy, all originality. If you are not a copy, people accuse you of being ill-mannered.
Stendhal
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.
Stendhal
The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage.
Stendhal
When you want to court a woman, court her sister first
Stendhal
I have a bad memory for facts.
Stendhal
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
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
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
Stendhal
Only great minds can afford a simple style.
Stendhal
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
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
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
To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You're supposed to seem bored.
Stendhal
Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.
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
