Stendhal

Who was Stendhal?

Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism, as is evident in the novels Le Rouge et le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme.

Famous Quotes:

• Beauty is the promise of happiness.
• 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.
• A wise woman never yields by appointment. It should always be an unforeseen happiness.
• 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.
• Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.
• One can acquire everything in solitude except character.
• 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.
• To describe happiness is to diminish it.
• Since I am a man, my heart is three or four times less sensitive, because I have three or four times as much power of reason and experience of the world -- a thing which you women call hard-heartedness. As a man, I can take refuge in having mistresses. The more of them I have, and the greater the scandal, the more I acquire reputation and brilliance in society.
• 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.