Life & Wisdom Quote by Ninon de L'Enclos

A clean little blade of elitism disguised as hospitality: Ninon de L'Enclos is arguing that the stage is not a mirror, it is an escape hatch. Her “ought” is doing heavy lifting. This isn’t mere preference; it’s a prescription for what art is for. Ordinary life already taxes you with mediocrity, anonymity, and social performance. Theater, she implies, should repay that debt with glamour, extremity, and the heightened pulse of character.

The subtext is a rebuke to realism before realism even becomes the dominant cultural style. De L’Enclos is writing from a salon world where wit, persona, and cultivated style are currencies, and where “ordinary” is less a demographic category than a failure of presentation. “Nondescript” doesn’t mean poor; it means unshaped. The theater’s job, in this worldview, is not to validate the everyday but to transfigure it. Larger-than-life acting becomes a kind of aesthetic nobility: not birthright, but performance quality.

There’s also a sly, almost proto-consumerist logic: audiences pay in time and attention, so why should they be served what they can get for free on the street? That framing turns art into a premium experience, which helps explain the quote’s staying power in celebrity culture. We still demand stars to be mythic, then punish them when their ordinariness leaks through. De L’Enclos isn’t naive about that tension; she’s endorsing it. The stage, for her, is where humanity is allowed to be exceptional on purpose.