Stendhal Men Quotations

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

The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water.

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.

If you think of paying court to the men in power, your eternal ruin is assured.

A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.

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

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 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.

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.

Perhaps men who cannot love passionately are those who feel the effect of beauty most keenly; at any rate this is the strongest impression women can make on them.

For the future, I shall rely only upon those elements of my character which I have tested. Who would ever have said that I should find pleasure in shedding tears? That I should love the man who proves to me that I am nothing more than a fool?

Ah, Sir, 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.

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

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

A man who is half an idiot, but who keeps a sharp lookout and acts prudently all his life, often enjoys the pleasure of triumphing over men of more imagination than he

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

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.

One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.

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