“Hypocrisy repels me even in love, and our great women aim for too lofty a performance. Napoleon has given them some ideas of morals and constancy.”
Stendhal
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Hypocrisy
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“Our true passions are selfish.”
Stendhal
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Passion
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“If I meet the Christian Deity, I am lost: He is a tyrant and as such, is full of ideas of vengeance; His Bible speaks of nothing but fearful punishments. I never loved Him! I could never even believe that anyone did love Him sincerely. He is devoid of pity…. He will punish me in some abominable manner.”
Stendhal
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“This religion takes away the courage of thinking of unusual things and prohibits self-examination above all as the most egregious of sins…. It is one step away from protestantism.”
Stendhal
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“A novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews [sic] the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.”
Stendhal
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“Politics in a literary work, is like a gun shot in the middle of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore.”
Stendhal
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“At a distance, we cannot conceive of the authority of a despot who knows all his subjects on sight.”
Stendhal
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Government
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“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.”
Stendhal
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“A strange effect of marriage, such as the nineteenth century has made it! The boredom of married life inevitably destroys love, when love has preceded marriage. And yet, as a philosopher has observed, it speedily brings about, among people who are rich enough not to have to work, an intense boredom with all quiet forms of enjoyment. And it is only dried up hearts, among women, that it does not predispose to love.”
Stendhal
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“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.”
Stendhal
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.”
Stendhal
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Love
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“Were I to buy this life of pleasure and this only chance at happiness with a few little dangers, where would be the harm? And wouldn’t it still be fortunate to find a weak excuse to give her proof of my love?”
Stendhal
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Happiness
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“The taste for freedom, the fashion and cult of happiness of the majority, that the nineteenth century is infatuated with was onlya heresy in his eyes that would pass like others.”
Stendhal
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Happiness
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“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.”
Stendhal
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Music
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“At La Scala it is customary to take no more than twenty minutes for those little visits one pays to boxes.”
Stendhal
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Music
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“Beauty is only the promise of happiness.”
Stendhal
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Beauty
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“What is really beautiful must always be true.”
Stendhal
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Beauty
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“It is with such eyes … that a pair of angels exiled among men … gaze at one another in mutual recognition.”
Stendhal
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Beauty
