Quotes by Stendhal

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The old age of both sexes depends on how the youth was lived.

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The painter's interest in personal gain destroys any work of art.

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Man lives on earth not to become rich, but to become happy.

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The more famous a painter is, the more he must desire titles and distinctions to serve as his defense.

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The stronger a man's character, the more unstable he is in his love relationships.

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Extraordinary beautiful women do not cause so much awe when you see them a second time.

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Youth is the time of courage.

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I will not be able to do anything for my personal happiness as long as I know that someone thinks I am a bad person.

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When we are sure that we have become the object of a woman's love, we are interested in how beautiful she is. When we don't know what's in her heart, we don't have time to think about the beauty of her face.

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When you love, you cannot drink the water of love from any other source than the one you find in the beloved source. In this case fidelity is a natural thing.

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Painting is the art with which the painter depicts passion through facial features and body position.

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The beauty of women does not come from ignorance.

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The man in love has no friends.

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The architectural aspect of a building that evokes in us feelings appropriate to its purpose is called style.

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The ship of life is carried by all storms and winds, if it is not maintained by the "ballast" of work.

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Beauty is but the promise of happiness.

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The beloved woman radiates more charm than she has.

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To love means to enjoy the pleasure of seeing and feeling with all your organs, and from as little a distance as possible, the being you love and who loves you.

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Love is a pleasant flower, but we must have the courage to pick it from the edge of a precipice.

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Love is the only passion that pays with the same coin that it mints itself.

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A love like Werter's opens the soul to all arts, to all romantic impressions, to moonlight, to the charm of the forest, to the beauty of painting, to everything sublime.

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Lovers often doubt the things they trust most.

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The point is not to learn to draw, but to learn to think.

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Even the severity of the beloved woman is full of a charm that we cannot find in other women even in the happiest moments.

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We must work, because work is the parent of pleasure.

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In a marriage where there is no love, in less than two months everything turns bitter.

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The beauty of love and passion lies not only in physical closeness, but especially in the last step taken towards it.

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In the world of feelings, there is only one law - to make the one you love happy.

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Anything can be acquired in solitude - except character.

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The true art is to inculcate in men the beautiful ideas which teach us to sacrifice everything for the good of mankind.

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We can say anything with our eyes. But at the same time, we can always refrain from looking, because her expression cannot be exactly repeated.

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Lovers are beyond crazy when it comes to how to dress more beautifully. In the presence of her lover, the woman thinks about something completely different than the way he is dressed.

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Any natural reason can cause upset.

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Any revolt against a foreign aggressor is a legitimate thing and is the primary duty of any people.

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When music is out of fashion, it does not become worse, but it no longer makes any impression on the simple hearts of young girls. And maybe we only liked her because she excited the hearts of young people.

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Flexibility of mind can replace beauty.

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The main quality of language is clarity.

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Yes, half of life - namely the most beautiful half - remains hidden from the man who has not loved passionately.

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Mademoiselle de Sommeri, being caught in the act by her lover, denied this fact. When her lover became angry, she said, "Now I see that you no longer love me, because you believe more in what you see than in what I say."

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The world will be fairer when it is more righteous.

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A modern building will no longer be fashionable in ten years and will become old. She will be even less pleasing to the eye in two hundred years' time, when fashions will change.

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The rose is the mother of boredom.

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The one who could not offer herself succeeds in selling herself.

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The novel is a mirror with which you walk on a long road. It reflects either the clear sky or the dirty puddles and papers.

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A weak passion strengthens the mind, and a strong passion weakens it.

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Tears are the highest form of a smile.

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Trying to be yourself is the only way to be successful.

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Passions cannot be seen directly with the eyes, like fires or funerals. We can only see how they manifest. He can find them in our hearts.

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The tendency towards the new is the primordial necessity of the human imagination.

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Shame is the mother of the subtlest of all passions - love.

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Shame is one of the causes of attraction to clothing. Being dressed in one way or another, the woman offers herself to a greater or lesser extent. This is why jewelry is inappropriate in old age.

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It's hard not to exaggerate the happiness you've been given to enjoy.

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The ability to hold a conversation is a real talent.

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To die for a friend under special circumstances is not as great as to sacrifice oneself for him daily and in secret.

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The ability to write correctly does not make anyone a genius.

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The cause of almost all the unpleasantness that happens to us in life lies in the fact that we misperceive the things around us. Therefore, thorough knowledge of people and things brings us closest to happiness.

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When he falls in love, the rational man no longer sees anything as he really is... An ordinary woman largely becomes unrecognizable and transforms into an exceptional being.

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My happiness would be complete if it were not for a victory - here is the happiness of a fool.

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You can know everything but yourself.

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Man cannot be talented in everything.

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We only like jealousy from those we can be jealous of.

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We must not discount anything that can make us great.

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It is not enough to have talent. The common opinion of contemporaries must show attraction to the creative efforts of this talent.

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The politician must be patient and restrain his indignation.

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Musical notation is just the art of writing down some ideas. It is important to have these ideas.

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We can only judge the strength of a passion by comparing it with the strength of the passion we have offered as a sacrifice.

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The greatest advantage of the mind is that it assures them, respect in old age.

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It takes very little hope for love to be born. In a little while hope may disappear, but love has already been born.

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A writer needs the same courage as a soldier. The writer needs to think about criticism as little as the soldier needs to think about the hospital.

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Until I loved, I was insignificant precisely because I sometimes wanted to consider myself great.

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A man can say almost nothing about what is going on in the heart of a tender woman. With a coquette things are different: sensitivity and vanity are our own and ourselves.

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Romanticism is the art of giving the people such literary works as can, in the modern context of customs and beliefs, be able to cause maximum pleasure.

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God's only excuse is that he doesn't exist.

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He thought of passion as a kind of gambling: a shameless fraud, in which only fools hope.

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Love is an essential part of novels. (...) Novels dictate the role and must play it; they set an example to follow.

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He had nothing more to wish for. He made this woman fall in love, there in the night room he himself was moved by her seductive beauty - he owed his victory to this, and not to his clumsy tricks. But even in his most tender moments he was stiffened by a strange pride, still wanting to play the part of the man who was used to dominating women. He tried with incredible effort to make it tasteless, which was lovable about him.

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If I am brave at the crucial moment, what do I care about how I feel now?

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Oh, what is the loyalty of a lover worth, if our hearts are broken by the coldness of the other whom we love more!

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I love strength: but of the strength I love, the ant can show as much as the elephant.

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Yes, gentlemen, the novel: a mirror, travels a long way. Sometimes it reflects the blue of the sky, sometimes the mud of the puddles on the road. And you yourself accuse the person who carries the mirror of immorality? The mirror shows a puddle, and they blame the mirror itself! They should rather blame the muddy road, even more so the road commissioner, who tolerates the water standing there and the puddles being born!

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Nothing is more interesting than passion; everything is unexpected in it, and the hero is also a victim. Nothing is more bleak than pleasure-love, here everything is calculated, as in all the prosaic affairs of life.

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Even the happiest love has its storms, one could even say: it lives just as much from its terrors as from its joys.

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There should always be a bit of doubt that needs to be quelled. Behold, this arouses the thirst of the moment and gives life to happy love. Because fear never shrinks from it, its delights never bore us.

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That's how the rich are! They humiliate the person, and then they think that they can make up for everything with a little monkeying around.

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If a person is innocent and does not know hateful emotions, he will undoubtedly stay young longer.

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Those who stand out are hated.

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He who has a great imagination becomes presumptuous and blind.

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Truth is unadorned.

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The rulers are also the most kind to those ministers who are fired the next day!

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In fact, we become old when we are no longer so blissfully immature!

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If you think someone is excellent, don't fulfill their desires, make it difficult for them to do their business! If he is truly excellent, he will clear and overcome obstacles.

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The love of reason is more abstract than true love, but it can only burn for moments, it knows too much and always criticizes itself; it cannot be separated from thought, in fact it is brought to life by thought.

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Love does not need equality: it creates it.

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There is no love without equality.

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A well-educated man, by the time he is twenty, is a thousand miles from that naturalness, without which love is often but the most wearisome duty.

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Love is like the Milky Way in the sky: a glittering mass of thousands and thousands of small stars, not one of which is itself a nebula.

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Love is like a fever; it is born and passes away without any part of the will being in it.

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Life is so short that one should not deprive oneself of joy, even if joy hides danger!

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I think I haven't found myself yet, I don't know my character yet; I always believed that happiness is where I am not...

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His happy memories took over and destroyed what his sanity had almost built. The mind struggles in vain with such memories; his rigorous attempts only strengthen their charm.

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Man always sees all the inconveniences of his present situation, but sees nothing of those that await him in the situation he longs for.

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Some hearts can only be accessed by wounding them.

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Too easy success soon robs love of its charm: obstacles increase its value.

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Love is a beautiful flower, but one must be brave enough to venture to the edge of the precipice for it.

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It annoys me when they write paripa instead of horse, because it's hypocritical.

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We are looking for a being in whose company we can boldly follow our first thought without ever having to worry about propriety.

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It is not appropriate to love someone whom we would be ashamed to wish as a spouse.

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The joys of love are always in proportion to the fear of losing them.

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If you can't keep a secret, you can't love either.

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Were those bastard priests right? How much they sin, and it seems that it is their privilege to know the psychology of sin!

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Is the road less beautiful if there are thorns in the hedge along the edge? One should just move on, leave the poisonous thorns behind, leave them in their bitter loneliness.

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Only the most determined courage will help in the ordeal. The soul delights in courage and forgets to ponder trouble.

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I'm not bashing or praising, I'm just observing.

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Whoever wants the goal must also want the means.

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True jealousy always increases the feeling of love.

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The greatest happiness that love can give us is the first handshake with the woman we love.

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Why do they want me to have the same opinion today as I did six weeks ago? Should my own statements be tyrant over me?

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The feelings of two lovers are almost never the same. Passionate love has its stages, one party's love is stronger at one, and the other party's love at another.

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I love mathematics for its own sake, and I still do, because it does not tolerate hypocrisy and obscurity, the two things that terrify me the most.

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The very first time you find yourself saying, "I'm bored," examine what's going on inside of you. This is where you have to start if you want to know yourself.

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A woman's strength is only as great as the amount of unhappiness she can punish her lover with.

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We can gain everything in solitude, but not character.

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Beauty is only a promise of happiness.

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The moment of intimacy resembles those beautiful days in May, which are so risky for beautiful flowers, - a moment that can become fatal and freeze the most beautiful hopes in a second.

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Enhancing happiness is a virtuous act; to multiply evil is a sin.

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Happiness is uniform only in terms of its source, but otherwise it is never the same. Each day has its own special flower.

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The loyalty of women in a marriage that lacks love is almost unnatural.

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This is how crazy love is! The perfection that one sees is not the same for another.

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In love our vanity scorns the very easy victory; man is not such as to place a very high value on what is offered to him in any field.

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If we look for the cause of what is happening, we will discover what will happen.

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At the time of the first youth, love is like a mighty river that carries everything with it and cannot be resisted. At the age of twenty-eight, however, the tender soul already knows itself; he knows that if there is still happiness for him in life, it can only be given by love.

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How happily the tourist falls down on the top of the mountain, which he reached with bitter struggles. But would he be happy if he had to rest there forever?

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Whenever I see a person covered in badges, I always have to think about the atrocities they had to commit to get those badges.

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Only a stupid person gets angry with others (...). The stone falls because it has weight. Will I remain a green youth forever? When will I learn to give people exactly what they pay me for? If I want them to esteem me, and to be able to esteem myself, I must show that my poverty is at the service of their wealth, but my heart is a thousand miles from their insolence, and I live higher than their contempt or small favors can reach.

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What is simple and modest is always overwhelmed by the dazzling!

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Hatred that attacks from contempt is always the fiercest.

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As soon as I see you, I immediately forget all my duties, only love lives in me! But this word - love - is not enough.

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He looked for a cure for his compulsion in another compulsion: also due to the fact that he was waiting for failure, the tension in his soul was released in advance, his responsibility weakened, and it weighed less heavily on his soul.

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Only I know what I would have done. In the eyes of others, I am at best a question mark.

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Courage cannot be learned!

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Tonight I realized that music, if it is impeccable, has exactly the same effect on the soul as when the presence of our loved one delights us, i.e. it gives us the most visually complete happiness in the world.

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To not love, even though heaven has gifted you with a loving heart, is to deprive yourself and others of happiness.

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Everything can be said with a look, and it can be denied later, since a look cannot be repeated verbatim.

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The whole art of love, I think, is nothing but saying what the degree of intoxication of the moment suggests, in other words, we have to listen to our soul.

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Love is the most powerful passion. Like all other passions, desires are forced to conform to cold reality; here, on the contrary, reality readily adapts to desires; this is the passion in which the wildest desires are rewarded with the greatest pleasures.