Stendhal. Phrases and fragments of his works on his anniversary

Marie henri beyle, the French writer best known by his pseudonym Stendhal was born on a day like today in 1793. Author of works such as About love, The Charterhouse of Parma o Red and blackHe was also an essayist and art critic as well as a novelist. Ahead of his time, his famous perception of art gave rise to the so-called Stendhal syndrome, which surely we have all experienced at some time. I remember her figure highlighting some snippets and phrases of those works.

The Charterhouse of Parma

• Life flees: do not show yourself so difficult to the happiness that is presented.
• There is no such thing as ridiculous when no one notices it.
• The lover thinks more often of reaching his beloved than the husband of keeping his wife.
• There are no forgotten masterpieces. The lies, the indulgences of the pen cannot bring a bad book to life.
• Once this fatal habit of mistrust is contracted, human weakness applies it to everything.
• The only serious thing in the world is the love and happiness that love gives.
• A half-foolish being, but alert and prudent every day, he often gives himself the pleasure of triumphing over men of imagination.
• Love discovers shades that are invisible to indifferent eyes and draws infinite consequences from them.
• Seeing death come is nothing when you are surrounded by heroic and affectionate souls, noble friends who squeeze your hand at the moment of the last breath, but how to maintain enthusiasm in the midst of some vile outlaws.

Red and black

Once or twice during that scene, Madame de Renal almost felt sympathy for the real misfortune of this man who, for twelve years, had been her friend. But true passions are selfish. Besides, she was waiting every moment for him to confess to having also received an anonymous letter the day before and that confession did not arrive.
It was still necessary for Madame de Renal to feel completely safe, to know what ideas they had been able to suggest to the man on whom her luck depended. Because, in the provinces, husbands are the owners of opinion. A husband who complains of having been cheated on is ridiculous, but his wife, if he does not give her money, will have to work as a worker at fifteen salaries a day and that, if he is lucky, since "decent" people will feel scruples and would not want to give him a job.
An odalisque, in the harem, has to love the sultan by force; he is almighty and she cannot take away his authority through a series of small niceties. The master's revenge is terrible, bloody, but also military and generous: one stab ends everything.

• Love is a wonderful flower, but it is necessary to have the courage to go and look for it on the edge of a horrible precipice.
• In bold and proud characters like yours, there is only one step between anger against oneself and bad humor against others. The outbursts of rage can provide, in that case, a lively pleasure.
• In addition to a fiery soul, Julian had one of those amazing memories that so often go hand in hand with foolishness.

Florence Diary, from the work of Rome, Naples and Florence

There, sitting on a kneeler, with his head resting on the back so that he could look up at the ceiling, the Sibyls del Volterrano gave me perhaps the most intense pleasure painting has ever given me. He was already in a kind of ecstasy at the idea of ​​being in Florence and by the proximity of the great men whose graves he had just seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, he saw it up close, touched it, so to speak. He had reached that point of excitement where heavenly sensations inspired by fine art and passionate feelings meet. Leaving Santa Croce, my heart was pounding; I felt what in Berlin they call nerves; life had been exhausted in me and I walked afraid of falling.