Stendhal Quotes

1783–1842 France

Marie-Henri Beyle (January 23, 1783 – March 23, 1842), more widely known as Stendhal, the most famous of his many pen-names, was a 19th century French writer.

France
Essayists
Novelists
Short story writers

Also known as: Henri Beyle, Marie Henri Beyle

Random Stendhal quote

58 quotes

At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.

La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839)

Coming back here often (on Lake Como) is like a drop of poison; it makes you want to never leave.

At La Scala it is customary to take no more than twenty minutes for those little visits one pays to boxes.

La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839)

This mania of the mothers of the period, to be constantly in pursuit of a son-in-law.

Armance (1827)

This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.

Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

Signs cannot be represented, in a spy’s report, so damningly as words.

Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

The politeness of the upper classes of France, and probably of England, prohibits all energy, and wears it out, if it by chance existed.

Souvenirs d'égotisme (Memoirs of an Egotist) (1832)

The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.

Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives.

De L'Amour (On Love) (1822)

I became merry or rather I acquired the art of appearing so.

Souvenirs d'égotisme (Memoirs of an Egotist) (1832)

A creature who is half an idiot, but who keeps a sharp look-out, and acts prudently all his life, often enjoys the pleasure of triumphing over men of imagination.

La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839)

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.

Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

The taste for freedom, the fashion and cult of happiness of the majority that the nineteenth century is infatuated with, was only a heresy in his eyes that would pass like others.

La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839)

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.

Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon’s proclamations.

La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839)

One day they asked Mme Montcortin what love is, she answered, "It's a nasty, dirty thing, of which chambermaids are sometimes accused, and, when they're convinced, they are chased."

Souvenirs d'égotisme (Memoirs of an Egotist) (1832)

The conversation of the true bourgeois about men and life, which is no more than a collection of ugly details, brings on a profound attack of spleen when I am obliged out of propriety to listen to it for any length of time.

Before law existed, the only natural thing was the strength of the lion, or the need of a creature who was cold or hungry, to put it in one word, need.

The pleasures and the cares of the luckiest ambition, even of limitless power, are nothing next to the intimate happiness that tenderness and love give. I am a man before being a prince, and when I have the good fortune to be in love my mistress addresses a man and not a prince.

La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Stendhal (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.