Top 70 Stendhal Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “One can acquire everything in solitude except character.”

— Stendhal

2. “I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.”

— Stendhal

3. “Our true passions are selfish.”

— Stendhal

4. “If you don’t love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.”

— Stendhal

5. “God’s only excuse is that he does not exist.”

— Stendhal

6. “There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.”

— Stendhal

7. “A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.”

— Stendhal

8. “Faith, I am no such fool; everyone for himself in this desert of selfishness which is called life.”

— Stendhal

9. “Misery destroys judgment.”

— Stendhal

10. “La palabra fue dada al hombre para ocultar su pensamiento.”

— Stendhal

11. “La belleza es la promesa de la felicidad.”

— Stendhal

12. “A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.”

— Stendhal

13. “There is nothing so beautiful, lovable and moving as the English countryside.”

— Stendhal

14. “I cannot provide the reality of events, I can only convey their shadow.”

— Stendhal

15. “It seems that my destiny is to die dreaming.”

— Stendhal

16. “The first instrument of a people’s genius is its language.”

— Stendhal

17. “Old age is nothing but the absence of madness, the loss of illusion and passion.”

— Stendhal

18. “Love is a beautiful flower, but we must be brave enough to pick her up from the edge of a precipice.”

— Stendhal

19. “The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.”

— Stendhal

20. “Nothing is so odious to the mediocre as mental superiority. There lies the source of hatred in the world of today.”

— Stendhal

21. “The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage.”

— Stendhal

22. “The lover thinks oftener of reaching his mistress than the husband thinks of guarding his wife; the prisoner thinks more often of escape than the jailer thinks of locking the doors. Therefore, in spite of every obstacle, the lover and the prisoner are certain to succeed.”

— Stendhal

23. “They can only touch the heart by bruising it.”

— Stendhal

24. “But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.”

— Stendhal

25. “Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.”

— Stendhal

26. “An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.”

— Stendhal

27. “Nici nu ar fi numit iubire decat acel sentiment eroic ce se putea intalni in Franta lui Henric al III-lea si Bassompierre, sentiment care nu ceda in fata obstacolelor, ba, departe de asa ceva, dadea nastere unor lucruri marete.”

— Stendhal

28. “It was the destiny of Napoleon – would it one day be his?”

— Stendhal

29. “Oh, if there were only a true religion. Fool that I am, I see a Gothic cathedral and venerable stained-glass windows, and my weak heart conjures up the priest to fit the scene. My soul would understand him, my soul has need of him. I only find a nincompoop with dirty hair.”

— Stendhal

30. “After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.”

— Stendhal

31. “Punish me for my atrocious pride,” she said to him, squeezing him in her arms as though to strangle him; “you are my master, I am your slave, I must beg pardon upon my knees for having sought to rebel.” She slipped from his embrace to fall at his feet. “Yes, you are my master,” she said again, intoxicated with love and joy; “reign over me for ever, punish your slave severely when she seeks to rebel.”

— Stendhal

32. “Courage was the fundamental quality in her character. Nothing was capable of giving her any excitement and of curing her of an ever-present tendency to boredom, but the idea that she was playing heads or tails with her whole existence.”

— Stendhal

33. “The great drawback of being witty is that you have to keep your eyes fixed on the semi-idiots around you, and absorb their worthless sensations.”

— Stendhal

34. “When one has just seen the woman one loves, the sight of every other woman damages the vision and physically hurts the eyes;.”

— Stendhal

35. “Julien felt himself to be strong and resolute like a man who sees clearly into his own heart.”

— Stendhal

36. “Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?”

— Stendhal

37. “Ah, Sir, 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 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

38. “What is this self, this I that I am? I know not. One fine day, I awoke to find myself upon this earth; I discovered my fate to be forever linked with a certain body, character, estate. Am I to spend all my days, then, ineffectually seeking to alter that which cannot be altered, and so, meanwhile, forget to live? Rather do I propose to accept myself as I am, humbly submitting to my own defects.”

— Stendhal

39. “Such are death, life, eternity- simple phenomena for those with organs of sense vast enough to comprehend them...”

— Stendhal

40. “Exalted by a sentiment of which she was proud, and that overcame all her arrogance, she was reluctant to let a moment of her life go by without occupying it with some remarkable deed.”

— Stendhal

41. “Prestige! Sir, is it nothing? To be revered by fools, gaped at by children, envied by the rich and scorned by the wise.”

— Stendhal

42. “Love of the head has doubtless more intelligence than true love, but it only has moments of enthusiasm. It knows itself too well, it sits in judgement on itself incessantly; far from distracting thought, it is made by sheer force of thought.”

— Stendhal

43. “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

44. “Leave me with my life of the imagination. Your petty pestering, your details of real life, which all upset me to some degree, would drag me down from heaven. Each person dies as best he may; my wish is not to think of death except in my own way.”

— Stendhal

45. “These gentlemen, although of the highest nobility,′ thought Julien, ‘are not in the least boring like the people who come to dine with M. de La Mole; and I can see why,’ he added a moment later,’they are not ashamed to be indecent.”

— Stendhal

46. “It seemed to Julian that there was far too much hair in his wig.”

— Stendhal

47. “Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought, it is itself reared only upon a structure of thought.”

— Stendhal

48. “The highest rational achievement of the finest intellects consists in grasping that certain matters lie beyond their powers to grasp.”

— Stendhal

49. “There’s one convenience about absolute power, that it sanctifies everything in the eyes of the people.”

— Stendhal

50. “In another moment she had torn herself from his arms, lighted the candle, and Julien had all the difficulty in the world in preventing her from cutting off all one side of her hair. “I wish to remind myself,” she told him, “that I am your servant: should my accursed pride ever make me forget it, show me these locks and say: “There is no question now of love, we are not concerned with the emotion that your heart may be feeling at this moment, you have sworn to obey, obey upon your honour.”

— Stendhal