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.

- Stendhal

If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.

- Stendhal

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.

- Stendhal

A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.

- Stendhal

Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.

- Stendhal

What is really beautiful must always be true.

- Stendhal

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.

- Stendhal

Far less envy in America than in France, and far less wit.

- Stendhal

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

- Stendhal

Never had he found himself so close to those terrible weapons of feminine artillery.

- Stendhal

The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.

- Stendhal

The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.

- Stendhal

This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.

- Stendhal

To describe happiness is to diminish it.

- Stendhal

The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.

- Stendhal

A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.

- Stendhal

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

- Stendhal

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

- Stendhal

Women are always eagerly on the lookout for any emotion.

- Stendhal

Love has always been the most important business in my life, I should say the only one.

- Stendhal