Best Quotes from Love by Stendhal with Page Numbers

My aim is to comprehend that passion, of which every sincere development has a character of beauty.

True love is often less refined; for that in which there is no passion and nothing unforeseen, has always a store of ready wit.

Physical pleasure, being of our nature, is known to everybody, but it takes no more than a subordinate position in the eyes of tender and passionate souls.

To love—that is to have pleasure in seeing, touching, feeling, through all the senses and as near as possible, an object to be loved and that loves us.

It is enough to think of a perfection in order to see it in that which you love.

This phenomenon, which I venture to call crystallisation, is the product of human nature.

The strongest proof of love is not merely positive proof, but rather the absence of hope.

Be loved or die—this conviction governs every moment of love.

The moment he is in love, the steadiest man sees no object such as it is.

The beauty then, discovered by you, being the appearance of an aptitude for giving you pleasure.

Love is the miracle of civilisation.

Modesty gives love the help of imagination—that is, gives it life.

There can be nothing worse for a timid, sensitive woman than the torture of having, in the presence of a man, allowed herself something for which she thinks she ought to blush.

A woman above the common sort has everything to gain by being very reserved in her manner.

The game is not fair: against the chance of a little pleasure or the advantage of seeming a little more lovable, a woman runs the risk of a burning remorse and a sense of shame.

As for the utility of modesty—she is the mother of love: impossible, therefore, to doubt her claims.

To make up for this—and to pass straight from Plymouth to Cadiz and Seville—I found in Spain that the warmth of climate and passions caused people to overlook a little the necessary measure of restraint.

Such is the empire of modesty, that a woman of feeling betrays her sentiments for her lover sooner by deed than by word.

Not to love, when given by Heaven a soul made for love, is to deprive yourself and others of a great blessing.

It is only since I began to love that I have learnt to put greatness into my character—such is the absurdity of education at our military academy.

The greatest happiness that love can give—'tis first joining your hand to the hand of a woman you love.

It is better to be silent than say things too tender at the wrong time.

Naturalness cannot be praised too highly. It is the only coquetry permissible in a thing so serious as love.

The whole art of love, as it seems to me, reduces itself to saying exactly as much as the degree of intoxication at the moment allows of.

If there is perfect naturalness between them, the happiness of two individuals comes to be fused together.

It goes without saying that one must not merely never lie to one's love, but not even embellish the least bit or tamper with the simple outline of truth.

The happiness of gallantry is quite otherwise—far more real, and far more subject to ridicule.

For the heart of the woman, whom you love, no longer understands your own; you lose that nervous involuntary movement of sincerity.

To me it seems that a reasonable woman ought not to give in completely to her lover, until she can hold out no longer.

The man, who is brave enough for this, will have instantly his reward in a kind of peacemaking.

Nothing is so odious to the mediocre as mental superiority.

For the passion to be able to survive, the inferior must ill-treat the other party.

The little quarrels of happy love foster a long time the illusion of a heart that still loves.

In love there is no such thing as ingratitude; the actual pleasure always repays, and more than repays, sacrifices that seem the greatest.

Love is a delicious flower, but one must have the courage to go and pick it on the edge of a frightful precipice.

What then of love? For here, everything being natural, especially on the part of the superior being, superiority is not masked by any social precaution.

It is possible that pride refuses to get used to this kind of occupation; in which case, after some stormy months, pride kills love.

A false kind of quarrelsome love can last longer than passion-love itself.

The love of a man, who loves well, delights in and vibrates to every movement of his imagination.

To be in love, even while enraged with the loved one, is nothing less... than having a ticket in a lottery, in which the prize is a thousand miles above all that you can offer me.

Feeling is too strong.

In the midst of all this variety of manners, among so many Englishwomen, who are the spiritual victims of Englishmen's pride, a perfect form of originality does exist.

Without ease, there is no grace.

Nothing makes a more energetic and direct appeal to that disposition of the spirit, which is most favourable to the tender passions—to naturalness.

A lover who, after ten years of intimate intercourse, deserted his poor mistress, because he began to notice her two-and-thirty years, was lost to honour.

If we oppose nature with impunity, there is only less happiness on earth and infinitely less generous inspiration.

Love reigned with joy, festivity and pleasure in the castles of happy Provence.

The absolute monarchy under Lewis XV had come to make baseness and perfidy the fashion in these relations.

In England, fashion raises a wall of bronze between New Bond Street and Fenchurch Street far different from that between the Chaussée d'Antin and the rue Saint-Martin at Paris.

I look upon the Spanish people as the living representatives of the Middle Age.

"In order for love to be seen in all the fullness of its power over the human heart, equality must be established between the mistress and her lover."

"Nothing changes for the inhabitant of the desert; there everything is eternal and motionless."

"The heroic age of the Arabs, that in which these generous hearts burnt unsullied by any affectation of fine wit or refined sentiment, was that which preceded Mohammed."

"The Arabs are a nation without houses."

"The basis on which crystallization rests will be widened; man will be able to take pleasure in all his ideas in company of the woman he loves."

"Happiness is contagious among people who live together."

"A woman ought to spend three or four hours of leisure every day, just as men of sense spend their hours of leisure."

"Is any woman specially mentioned as being able to read?"

"With the ideas that she has got from her rose, she will soon bore you on your return, whereas a woman who has read Shakespeare will be happier to give you her arm for a solitary walk…"

"And thus under the vain pretext of decency you teach young girls nothing that can give them guidance in the circumstances they will encounter in their lives."

"Genius is a power; but still more is it a torch, to light the way to the great art of being happy."

"In both sexes it is on the manner in which youth has been employed that depends the fate of extreme old age—this is true for women earlier than for men."

"The most perfect woman leaves her partner isolated amid the dangers of life and soon runs the risk of wearying him."

"How is a woman of forty-five received in society? Severely, or more often in a way that is below her dignity."

"The ignorance of women causes this magnificent chance to be lost to the human race."

"A mother of intellect and culture will give her young son a grasp not only of all merely agreeable talents, but also of all talents that are useful to man in society."

"What an excellent counsellor would a man not find in a wife, if only she could think—a counsellor whose interests, apart from one single object, are exactly identical with his own!"

"As for a higher morality—the clearer the mind, the surer the conviction that justice is the only road to happiness."

"Teach girls, therefore, reading, writing and arithmetic by the monitorial system, in the central convent schools."

"The ruins of youthful talents become merely ridiculous, and it were a happiness for our women, such as they actually are, to die at fifty."

Everything can be acquired in solitude, except character.

A proof of love comes to light, when all the pleasures and all the pains, which all the other passions and wants of man can produce, in a moment cease working.

To have a solid character is to have a long and tried experience of life's disillusions and misfortunes. Then it is a question of desiring constantly or not at all.

Nothing kills gallant love like gusts of passion-love from the other side.

In love, to share money is to increase love, to give it is to kill love.

With very gentle souls a woman needs to be easy-going in order to encourage crystallisation.

A bold resolution can change in an instant the most extreme misfortune into quite a tolerable state of things.

Real love renders the thought of death frequent, agreeable, unterrifying, a mere subject of comparison, the price we are willing to pay for many a thing.

The existence of great souls is not suspected. They hide away; all that is seen is a little originality. There are more great souls than one would think.

The first clasp of the beloved's hand—what a moment that is!

To have firmness of character means to have experienced the influence of others on oneself. Therefore others are necessary.

Poetry, with its obligatory comparisons, its mythology in which the poet doesn't believe, its dignity of style à la Louis XIV, and all its superfluous stock of ornaments called poetical, is very inferior to prose when it comes to a question of giving a clear and precise idea of the working of the heart.

In him particularly there is a sweet, all-pervading melancholy, that gives even to his pleasures the tone of dreaminess and sadness which constitutes his charm.

If any poet of antiquity introduced moral sensibility into love, it was Tibullus.

The only unions legitimate for all time are those that answer to a real passion.

Real passion has only to be crossed for it to produce apparently more unhappiness than happiness.

Love gives the keenest possible of all sensations—and the proof is that in these moments of 'inflammation,' as physiologists would say, the heart is open to those 'complex sensations'.

For the soul of a great painter or a great poet, love is divine in that it increases a hundredfold the empire and the delight of his art.

To will means to have the courage to expose oneself to troubles; to expose oneself is to take risks—to gamble.

Only contempt, I think, can cure this passion; not contempt too violent, for that is torture.

Reason! Reason! Reason! That is what the world is always shouting at poor lovers.

The action of Cromwell's son was the wisest a man could take: he preferred obscurity and repose to the bother and danger of ruling over a people sombre, fiery and proud.

The existence of a man, who has succeeded after winning her love in dishonouring her, must poison her life.

Love is the only passion that mints the coin to pay its own expenses.

Pleasure does not produce half so strong an impression as pain.

The most flattering thing that the most exalted imagination could find to say to the generation now arising among us...this generation has nothing to continue, it has everything to create.

I should like to be able to say something on consolation. Enough is not done to console.

All Europe, put together, could never make one French book of the really good type.

A dictionary of music has never been achieved, nor even begun.

In France too much power is given to Women, far too little to Woman.