MFatih55

“In the past, Julien said to her, when I could have been so extraordinarily happy during our walks in the woods at Vergy, furious ambition transported my soul to imaginary realms. Instead of me pressing this lovely arm, which was so near to my lips, my heart, the future took me away from you; I was engaged with the innumerable struggles I would have to endure to amass a vast fortune...”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“Now it happened that just the night before last Julien had been to see M. Casimir Delavigne's tragedy, Marino Faliero. - Wasn't Israel Bertuccio a greater figure than all those Venetian nobles? our rebellios plebian asked himself; and yet they were men whose noble lineage can be traced back to the year 700, a century before Charlemagne, while all the best born of those who were at M. de Retz's ball this evening only go back, and even then most lamely, to the thirtheenth century. Well, good! in the mids of those Venetian nobles, so very high born, it is Israel Bertuccio one remembers.

A conspiracy annihilates all the titles produced by the arbitrary decisions of society. In it a man instantly assumes the rank given him by his manner of envisaging death. Intelligence itself loses its sway...

Where would Danton be today, in the age of Valenod and de Rênal? - not even a deputy crown prosecutor...”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“No one ever comes back." Millions on millions would be born almost identical, with eyes, a nose, a mouth, a skull and a mind within it, without he who lay there on the bed ever reappearing again. For some years he had lived, eaten, laughed, loved, hoped like all the world. And it was all over for him all over for ever. Life; a few days, and then nothing. One is born, one grows up, one is happy, one waits, and then one dies. Farewell, man or woman, you will not return again to earth. Plants, beast, men, stars, worlds, all spring to life, and then die to be transformed anew. But never one of them comes back—insect, man, nor planet. A huge, confused, and crushing sense of terror weighed down the soul of Duroy, the terror of that boundless and inevitable annihilation destroying all existence. He already bowed his head before its menace. He thought of the flies who live a few hours, the beasts who live a few days, the men who live a few years, the worlds which live a few centuries. What was the difference between one and the other? A few more days' dawn that was all”
― Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami

“Men often pass from love to ambition, but they seldom come back again from ambition to love.”
― François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims