STENDHAL

Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.

Friendship has its illusions no less than love.

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

Our true passions are selfish.

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.

God's only excuse is that he does not exist.

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

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

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

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

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

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.

She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?

The more one pleases everybody, the less one pleases profoundly.

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.

Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.

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

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

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.

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.

To describe happiness is to diminish it.

To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.

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

People happy in love have an air of intensity.