Life & Wisdom Quote by Stendhal

Stendhal’s line is a cocktail of flirtation and condescension, delivered with the novelist’s knack for sounding like he’s diagnosing human nature while really staging a social scene. “Always” and “eagerly” do the heavy lifting: the sentence isn’t interested in women as individuals but in women as a type - a gendered audience perpetually scanning the room for feeling the way a gambler scans faces for tells. It’s a neat reversal of the era’s sentimental ideal. Instead of women being naturally full of emotion, they’re cast as emotion’s consumers: alert, acquisitive, almost predatory in their attention to it.

The subtext is less about women than about the emotional economy of Stendhal’s world. Early 19th-century France is a culture where polite society runs on coded signals, reputation management, and romantic performance. If men are trained to treat emotion as risk - something to hide, ration, weaponize - then “women” become the designated interpreters, the ones expected to make meaning out of scraps. The line flatters (women are perceptive, attuned) while also policing (women are emotional opportunists, easily stirred, possibly unreliable). That ambiguity is the point: Stendhal can indulge desire for emotional intensity and still keep a safe, ironic distance from it.

It also reads as a self-portrait in disguise. A writer who lives by noticing feelings projects his own vigilance onto women, turning his artistic temperament into a gendered claim. The aphorism works because it’s crisp, unfair, and socially useful: it lets the speaker sound worldly, lets the listener nod, and keeps the messy truth - that everyone is hunting for emotion, just under different alibis - tucked offstage.