Stendhal Quotes

The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction.

With most people, strangers are not only enemies, but inferiors.

The mind is lowered through association with inferiors. With equals it attains equality; and with superiors, superiority.

Women and people of low birth are very hard to deal with. If you are friendly to them, they get out of hand, and if you keep your distance, they resent it.

Besides, I've been feeling a little blue — just a pale, elusive azure. It isn't serious enough for anything darker.

They looked down on her; and she looked up through them.

Power seems to confer on its possessor a mantle of superiority, specialness, and sexual potency, which the envious person desperately wants because he feels himself on some level to be inferior, unimportant, and impotent.

Superiority and inferiority are individual, not racial or national.

Boredom, Timothy Duane assured me, is nothing more than anger without passion.

Men are forever eager to press drink upon those they consider their superiors, hoping thereby to eliminate that distinction between them.... And women, when confronted by superiors, substitute for drink the crippling liquor of their sex.

Anger makes people feel uncomfortable, because the minute somebody shows it, it puts you in a position where you can't laugh or make light of something... not to trivialise it I don't mean. But your reaction to anger is supposed to be fear or returned anger. So, you're really trying to control a situation when you show anger and it's a very weak position to take. It often works on people who aren't in a position to fight back.

I used flowers because they die. My mood was darkly romantic at the time.

Be very circumspect in the choice of thy company. In the society of thine equals thou shalt enjoy more pleasure; in the society of thy superiors thou shalt find more profit. To be the best in the company is the way to grow worse; the best means to grow better is to be the worst there.

I'm not really a happy person. It's a question of temperament. I have a tendency toward melancholy. You can feel quite happily melancholic.

Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.

I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.

I'm not melancholy; I'm a happy-go-lucky person, kind of silly. I like funny things. I have a lot of energy. I tend to like music that's mellow, though.

You must be either the servant or the master, the hammer or the anvil.

...my boredom might be described as a malady affecting external objects and consisting of a withering process; an almost instantaneous loss of vitality--just as though one saw a flower change in a few seconds from a bud to decay and dust.

My boredom with everything has numbed me.

Maybe 90 percent of the time it looks like I'm not having a good time.

Boredom is just the reverse side of fascination.

The Britisher is the top dog and the Indian the underdog in his own country.