Life & Wisdom Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Modernity, in this formulation, isn’t a destination; it’s a perpetual break-in period. The line proposes a deliciously circular engine: a work becomes “modern” only after it has passed through “postmodern” self-awareness, as if art must first doubt its own seriousness before it’s allowed to feel new. That twist makes the claim work rhetorically. It turns the usual timeline (modernism then postmodernism) into a psychological sequence: first comes the suspicion, the meta-glance, the awareness of artifice; only then can something risk sincerity without sounding naive.

The subtext is almost diagnostic. “Postmodern” here isn’t a historical movement with dates and signatures; it’s a condition of consciousness - an artist catching themselves in the act, noticing the conventions, hearing the echo of prior styles. Once you can’t unsee the scaffolding, you’re forced to build differently. That compulsion is what the quote calls “nascent,” not as infancy but as continual rebirth: the work is always being born into the reality that it arrives after other works, after genres, after expectations.

Attributed to La Rochefoucauld, the irony is hard to ignore. A 17th-century moralist, famous for aphorisms about vanity and self-deception, is an apt vessel for a thought that treats originality as a kind of sophisticated self-knowledge. The context isn’t literal postmodern theory so much as his enduring obsession: nothing is pure, least of all our motives - and by extension, our aesthetics. Modernity, he suggests, is what happens after the loss of innocence becomes productive.