82 quotes found
Writer · French · 1783–1842
French writer (1783–1842)
“Les vraies passions sont égoïstes.”
“A good book is an event in my life.”
“To describe happiness is to diminish it.”
“The only unhappiness is a life of boredom.”
“Le même esprit ne dure que deux cents ans.”
“God's only excuse is that he does not exist”
“There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.”
“I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.”
“For the future, I shall rely only upon those elements of my character which I have tested. Who would ever have said that I should find pleasure in shedding tears? That I should love the man who pro...”
“A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.”
“Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?”
“Mathilde made an effort to use the more intimate form; she was evidently more attentive to this unusual way of speaking than to what she was saying. This use of the singular form, stripped of the t...”
“The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a foo...”
“Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought,...”
“The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.”
“An English traveller relates how he lived upon intimate terms with a tiger; he had reared it and used to play with it, but always kept a loaded pistol on the table.”
“Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirro...”
“A melancholy air can never be the right thing; what you want is a bored air. If you are melancholy, it must be because you want something, there is something in which you have not succ”
“Has he written to you?''He writes frequently.''Shew me his letters this instant, I order you'; and M. de Renal added six feet to his stature.”
“The first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers - is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to hav...”
“Julien felt himself to be strong and resolute like a man who sees clearly into his own heart.”
“To write a book is to risk being shot at in public.”
“One can acquire everything in solitude except character.”
“Chlan had acted as imprudently for Julien as he had for himself. He had given him the habit of reasoning correctly, and of not being put off by empty words, but he had neglected to tell him that th...”
