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
clever people energy
I no longer find such pleasure in that preeminently good society, of which I was once so fond. It seems to me that beneath a cloak of clever talk it proscribes all energy, all originality. If you are not a copy, people accuse you of being ill-mannered.
world clear ifs
I see but one rule: to be clear. If I am not clear, all my world crumbles to nothing.
imagination pistols shots
Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.
hero men france
Napoleon was indeed the man sent by God to help the youth of France! Who is to take his place?
ambition power men
The pleasures and the cares of the luckiest ambition, even of limitless power, are nothing next to the intimate happiness that tenderness and love give. I am man before being a prince, and when I have the good fortune to be in love, my mistress addresses a man and not a prince.
style vision
There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.
hands want-something air
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.
leadership art men
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.
ambition men years
The first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers - is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.
women emotion
Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.
beauty beautiful being-true
What is really beautiful must always be true.
please
The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.
race musical earth
The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.
friendship illusion
Friendship has its illusions no less than love.