A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.
About Stendhal
Marie-Henri Beyleand La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839), he is highly regarded for the acute analysis of his characters’ psychology and considered one of the early and foremost practitioners of realism.
More quotes from Stendhal
Love has always been the most important business in my life, I should say the only one.
19th century French writer
All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
19th century French writer
Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.
19th century French writer
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.
19th century French writer
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
19th century French writer
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
19th century French writer
Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.
19th century French writer
Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit.
19th century French writer
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.
19th century French writer
If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.
19th century French writer
The more a race is governed by its passions, the less it has acquired the habit of cautious and reasoned argument, the more intense will be its love of music.
19th century French writer
To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.
19th century French writer
The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.
19th century French writer
The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse – as a luxury befitting a young man.
19th century French writer
God’s only excuse is that he does not exist.
19th century French writer
A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
19th century French writer
A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.
19th century French writer
Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.
19th century French writer
Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.
19th century French writer
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.
19th century French writer
Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.
19th century French writer
She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?
19th century French writer
Our true passions are selfish.
19th century French writer
The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.
19th century French writer
The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.
19th century French writer
One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
19th century French writer
What is really beautiful must always be true.
19th century French writer
People happy in love have an air of intensity.
19th century French writer
A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.
19th century French writer
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.
19th century French writer
Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.
19th century French writer
This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
19th century French writer
To describe happiness is to diminish it.
19th century French writer
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.
19th century French writer
Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
19th century French writer
The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
19th century French writer
The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.
19th century French writer
Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.
19th century French writer
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.
19th century French writer
A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.
19th century French writer
If you don’t love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.
19th century French writer
Only great minds can afford a simple style.
19th century French writer
Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.
19th century French writer
Friendship has its illusions no less than love.
19th century French writer