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
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.
children spring
Spring appears and we are once more children.
blessing boredom age
This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
avarice-greed morality kind
Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.
careers painful divine
Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.
mad advice pay
I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.
powerful grief men
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.
pleasure sample ifs
But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.
boredom married inevitable
The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage.
bottles moral champagne
After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.
life men vanity
Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.