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Quotes from Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) — Stendhal

1783–1842 France

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12 quotes

When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.

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

In our calling, we have to choose; we must make our fortune either in this world or in the next, there is no middle way.

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

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

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

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)

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)

It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors of all the drawing-rooms in her face.

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

Napoleon was indeed the man sent by God to help the youth of France! Who is to take his place?

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

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.

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

Our true passions are selfish.

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

Why does he not know how to select servants? 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.

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

Attribution

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