Stendhal

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

The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.

Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.

Our true passions are selfish.

The more a race is governed by its passions, the less it has acquired the habit of cautious and reasoned argument, the more intense will be its love of music.

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

If you don't love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.

The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.

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.

A very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.