Beauty is nothing but the promise of happiness.
Quote
Beauty is nothing but the promise of happiness.
The story behind this quote
The sentence appears in On Love, the essay Stendhal published in 1822, in chapter XVII about beauty “dethroned by love”. Stendhal observes that a man can come to love a woman he first found plain: within a few days, his memories and hopes have erased the flaws of her face. Beauty therefore has no absolute value: it is worth the happiness it lets us hope for.
He adds straight away that this happiness changes with the times: a Greek’s happiness was not that of a Frenchman of 1822. This is the theory of “crystallization” at the heart of the book: the lover adorns the beloved with every perfection, the way a bare branch left in the salt mines of Salzburg becomes covered with crystals.
The book sold very poorly when it came out. The phrase nonetheless became famous: Baudelaire quotes it in The Painter of Modern Life, and Nietzsche discusses it at length, setting it against the idea of a beauty contemplated without desire.
Original text
La beauté n’est que la promesse du bonheur.
The source
On Love (De l’amour), Chapter XVII, 1822
Original text checked word for word in the work; the translation is by quotesay.
Author
Stendhal
Henri Beyle, known as Stendhal, wrote The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma. His essay On Love (1822) analyses the birth of love, which he compares to a “crystallisation”.
Quotes by Stendhal