Stendhal Quotations | Page 2

Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing?

Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.

The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world

It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover.

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

An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.

There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.

A melancholy air can never be the right thing; what you want is a bored air. If you are melancholy, it must be because you want something, there is something in which you have not succeeded. It is shewing your inferiority. If you are bored, on the other hand, it is the person who has tried in vain to please you who is inferior.

The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water.

The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.