Talk:Stendhal

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

• All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

• When you want to court a woman, court her sister first.

• "What a pity this is not a sin!" of eating ice cream for the first time (quoted in among others Delmore Schwartz's Summer Poems)
  • apparently a misattributed version of a paragraph in Stendhal's Italian Chronicles, "Cenci" chapter (largely fictional; if real, presumably referring to either sorbet or Italian ices rather than dairy ice cream proper):

So it is in Italy alone, and there only in the sixteenth century that this singular character could make his first appearance. It was in Italy and in the seventeenth century that a Princess said, as she sipped an ice with keen enjoyment on the evening of a hot day: “What a pity, this is not a sin!”