Stendhal
A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.Collection: Happiness
A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.Collection: Love
The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.Collection: Wisdom
Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.Collection: Power
Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.Collection: Art
If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.Collection: Romantic
To describe happiness is to diminish it.Collection: Happiness
People happy in love have an air of intensity.Collection: Love
The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.Collection: Fear
Only great minds can afford a simple style.Collection: Great
Friendship has its illusions no less than love.Collection: Friendship
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.
One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.
God's only excuse is that he does not exist.
Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.
All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.
Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.
To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.
Our true passions are selfish.
Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.
The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.
Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.
If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.
Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.
A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.
She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?
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.
Love has always been the most important business in my life, I should say the only one.
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.
A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.
Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit.
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.
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.
This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
What is really beautiful must always be true.
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.
The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.
Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.
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.
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.
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.
The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.
It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.
Love is a well from which we can drink only as much as we have put in, and the stars that shine from it are only our eyes looking in.Collection: Love
Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.Collection: Feet
Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.Collection: Promise
Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us.Collection: Events
Women prefer emotions to reasoning.Collection: Emotion
When you want to court a woman, court her sister firstCollection: Want