Stendhal: Quotes about love

Stendhal was French writer. Explore interesting quotes on love.
Stendhal: 100   quotes 35   likes

“The pleasures and the cares of the luckiest ambition, even of limitless power, are nothing next to the intimate happiness that tenderness and love give.”

Source: La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839), Ch. 7
Context: The pleasures and the cares of the luckiest ambition, even of limitless power, are nothing next to the intimate happiness that tenderness and love give. I am a man before being a prince, and when I have the good fortune to be in love my mistress addresses a man and not a prince.

“A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth!”

Une femme de quarante ans n'est plus quelque chose que pour les hommes qui l'ont aimée dans sa jeunesse!
Source: La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839), Ch. 23

“Were I to buy this life of pleasure and this only chance at happiness with a few little dangers, where would be the harm? And wouldn’t it still be fortunate to find a weak excuse to give her proof of my love?”

Quand je devrais acheter cette vie de délices et cette chance unique de bonheur par quelques petits dangers, où serait le mal? Et ne serait-ce pas encore un bonheur que de trouver ainsi une faible occasion de lui donner une preuve de mon amour?
Source: La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839), Ch. 20

“A strange effect of marriage, such as the nineteenth century has made it! The boredom of married life inevitably destroys love, when love has preceded marriage. And yet, as a philosopher has observed, it speedily brings about, among people who are rich enough not to have to work, an intense boredom with all quiet forms of enjoyment. And it is only dried up hearts, among women, that it does not predispose to love.”

Étrange effet du mariage, tel que l'a fait le XIXe siècle! L'ennui de la vie matrimoniale fait périr l'amour sûrement, quand l'amour a précédé le mariage. Et cependant, dirait un philosophe, il amène bientôt chez les gens assez riches pour ne pas travailler, l'ennui profond de toutes les jouissances tranquilles. Et ce n'est que les âmes sèches parmi les femmes qu'il ne prédispose pas à l'amour.
Vol. I, ch. XXIII
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) (1830)

“Love has always been the most important business in my life; I should say the only one.”

L'amour a toujours été pour moi la plus grande des affaires ou plutôt la seule.
La Vie d'Henri Brulard (1890)
Variant translation: Love has always been the most important business in my life, or rather the only one.

“War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon’s proclamations.”

La guerre n'était donc plus ce noble et commun élan d'âmes amantes de la gloire qu'il s'était figuré d'après les proclamations de Napoléon!
Source: La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma) (1839), Ch. 3