Stendhal

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

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.

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.

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

If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.

Pleasure is often spoiled by describing it.

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

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

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

Friendship has its illusions no less than love.

The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.

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

Our true passions are selfish.

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.

What is really beautiful must always be true.

Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

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.

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

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.