Stendhal - Man Quotes

16 Sourced Quotes

View all Stendhal Quotes
Since I am a man, my heart is three or four times less sensitive, because I have three or four times as much power of reason and experience of the world — a thing which you women call hard-heartedness.
As a man, I can take refuge in having mistresses. The more of them I have, and the greater the scandal, the more I acquire reputation and brilliance in society.

Stendhal
Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.

Stendhal
The count had reached his fifties: a cruel word whose resonance can perhaps be fully appreciated only by a man desperately in love.

Stendhal
Napoleon was indeed the man sent by God to help the youth of France! Who is to take his place?

Stendhal
Why does he not know how to select servants? The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.

Stendhal
When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.

Stendhal
Woman is a delightful musical instrument, of which love is the bow, and man the artist.

Stendhal
A novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form.

Stendhal
Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?

Stendhal
The pleasures and the cares of the luckiest ambition, even of limitless power, are nothing next to the intimate happiness that tenderness and love give. I am a man before being a prince, and when I have the good fortune to be in love my mistress addresses a man and not a prince.

Stendhal
The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse — as a luxury befitting a young man.

Stendhal
Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who has been surrounded by flatterers since birth.

Stendhal
The nervous fluid in man is consumed by the brain; in woman, by the heart: it is there that they are the most sensitive.

Stendhal
To be loved at first sight, a man should have at the same time something to respect and something to pity in his face.

Stendhal
The first virtue of a young man today - that is, for the next fifty years perhaps, as long as we live in fear, and religion has regained its powers - is to be incapable of enthusiasm and not to have much in the way of brains.

Stendhal
Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.

Stendhal