Skip to content

Stendhal on Valentine's Day

1783–1842 France

← All quotes by Stendhal

8 quotes

In love, unlike most other passions, the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future.

De L'Amour (On Love) (1822)

Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.

Love has always been the most important business in my life; I should say the only one.

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

De L'Amour (On Love) (1822)

A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth!

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

True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.

De L'Amour (On Love) (1822)

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)

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.