Life & Wisdom Quote by Ninon de L'Enclos

A razor-thin “choice” is doing a lot of work here: it flatters men’s romantic self-image while quietly indicting their laziness. Ninon de L’Enclos frames women as legible only at a cost, and she makes that cost incompatible with the dreamy abandon of “loving.” The line functions like a salon-ready trap: agree with it and you admit you’ve preferred fantasy over curiosity; disagree and you’re forced to explain how you’ve managed both without reducing women to a puzzle to be solved.

The subtext is less about women’s alleged inscrutability than about how men are trained to relate to them. “Understanding” reads as knowledge, yes, but also as control: the Enlightenment impulse to classify, to master, to turn a person into a concept. By contrast, “loving” can be genuine intimacy - or, more cynically, a permission slip to keep women in soft focus, adored but not listened to. De L’Enclos, a famed courtesan and salonniere who lived by her intelligence as much as her desirability, knew the men who prized women as muses while resisting women as minds.

Context sharpens the bite. In a 17th-century France where women navigated power through conversation, reputation, and patronage, the salon was both stage and battleground: a place where women could shape taste and politics, yet still be denied full personhood. The quote’s elegance is its weapon. It doesn’t plead for equality; it exposes the bargain men already make, and dares them to notice the loss hidden inside their romance.