"His shell was too hard—and this was the tragedy of his existence. He was reserved to excess, and kept everything locked up within himself."

"I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of life."

"I never had any other desire so strong .. that I might be master at last of a small house and large garden,"

"I am glad that you approve and applaud my design of withdrawing myself from all tumult and business of the world..."

"... solitude can be well fitted and set right but upon a very few persons."

Freedom with virtue takes her seat/Her proper place, her only scene/Is in the golden mean/She lives not with the poor, nor with the great.

"Calmness is the rarest quality in human life. It is the poise of a great nature, in harmony with itself and its ideals."

"For one thing, you may be strenuously advised to keep reading."

"And, just like Saint-Simon, seemingly a shallow courtier at the king’s court, secretly he becomes the actor and judge of an entire epoch."

"At first he noticed merely that he was different from the ruck, that he was more delicately poised, more sensitive, more keen-sighted."

"FEW have lied more arrantly or quizzed the world with greater delight than Stendhal; few have told the truth with more profundity than he."

"MANY YEARS a favorite wish has accompanied me. This favorite wish was a pretty one, — a refuge."

"Perhaps you have hit upon the ideal of being a poet because you see a poet as an original, a perceptive and a pious man, pure in heart..."

" I fear we are most of us like Mrs. Poyser's bantam cock, who fancied the sun got up every morning to hear him crow."

"Sport presents three main elements: the spectacle, the competition, and the personalities of the gladiators."

'I believe what we lack is joy. The ardor that a heightened awareness imparts to life,.."

"Thus it was not long before I began to see the world as long-voyage sailors must always have seen it."

"We can count these stars, and yet we cannot believe that we exist as far as they are concerned."

"The sea is like music; it has all the dreams of the soul within itself and sounds them over."

"So we say farewell to a dear and faithful friend, whose virtues we remember — and dogs have few faults."

"Words, then, are not useful. Let us now enquire into their other quality, their positive quality, that is, their power to tell the truth."

" But here, none too soon, are the second-hand bookshops. Here we find anchorage in these thwarting currents of being..."

"Little by little I made an inner life for myself. I read a great deal of Hugo and Gautier. We begin with the picturesque and the romantic."