Stendhal
Stendhal
Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Best known for the novels Le Rouge et le Noirand La Chartreuse de Parme, he is highly regarded for the acute analysis of his characters' psychology and considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth23 January 1783
CountryFrance
men thinking ruins
If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.
love passion men
One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.
interesting landscape moral
It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest.
please
The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.
imagination pistols shots
Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.
bored taste sorrowful
To seem sorrowful is not in good taste: You're supposed to seem bored.
suicide grief feelings
Why not make an end of it all?... My life is a succession of griefs and bitter feelings.... What is death?... A very small matter,when all is said; only a fool would be concerned about it.
family heart self
People are less self-conscious in the intimacy of family life and during the anxiety of a great sorrow. The dazzling varnish of anextreme politeness is then less in evidence, and the true qualities of the heart regain their proper proportions.
firsts want court
When you want to court a woman, court her sister first
expression law suffering
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.
years style nobility
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
music sweet thinking
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.
beauty beautiful being-true
What is really beautiful must always be true.
soul delight firsts
The first characteristic of Rossini's music is speed - a speed which removes from the soul all the sombre emotions that are so powerfully evoked within us by the slow strains in Mozart. I find also in Rossini a cool freshness, which, measure by measure, makes us smile with delight.