One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
StendhalRead
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.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that memories of past love can often feel more valuable and fulfilling than future possibilities.
Stendhal reflects on the nature of love, highlighting how the fond memories of a past relationship can create a sense of nostalgia that feels richer than any future romantic hope. It suggests that the emotional weight of what one has experienced can overshadow the uncertainties of what lies ahead in love, emphasizing the bittersweet nature of past relationships.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the profound impact of past relationships during a wedding toast.
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.
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.
The scene I had just witnessed (a couple making love in the ocean) brought back a lot of memories β not of things I had done but of things I had failed to do, wasted hours and frustrated moments and opportunities forever lost because time had eaten so much of my life and I would never get it back. I envied Yeoman and felt sorry for myself at the same time, because I had seen him in a moment that made all my happiness seem dull.
Ah, me, if this is love, then how it torments.
She is standing on my lids And her hair is in my hair She has the colour of my eye She has the body of my hand In my shade she is engulfed As a stone against the sky She will never close her eyes And she does not let me sleep And her dreams in the bright day Make the suns evaporate And me laugh cry and laugh Speak when I have nothing to say
My heart went cold and only hollow rhythms resounded from within, but then he rose, brilliant as the moon in full and sank in the burrows of my keep, and all my armor, falling down, in a pile at my feet.
Because there is nothing here than invites us to cherish unhappy lovers. Nothing is more vain than to die for love. What we ought to do is live.
Love had always issued out of the places that hurt the most.
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