Success Quote by Ninon de L'Enclos

Ninon de L'Enclos writes selfhood like a battlefield report: no neutral days, no moral draw, no harmless “just passing time.” The line turns ordinary behavior into a constant referendum on identity, a deliberately severe framing from a woman who made a life by refusing the era’s approved scripts. In 17th-century France, to be a witty salonniere, a courtesan, an intellectual, and still maintain autonomy was not a lifestyle brand; it was a high-wire act performed under religious and social surveillance. The quote’s bite comes from that pressure. When your freedom is conditional, “small” choices stop looking small.

The intent is pragmatic, even predatory in its clarity: discipline your life by treating each gesture as strategic. De L’Enclos isn’t selling uplift; she’s offering a method for staying sovereign. The subtext is that identity isn’t discovered, it’s won - and “want” is not a guilty word. In her world, desire had to be defended, negotiated, and styled into acceptability. So she recasts desire as a project with stakes.

What makes the sentence work is its binary absolutism. “Every action” leaves no loopholes, while “victory or defeat” borrows the language of politics and war to dignify the private realm. It’s also a subtle rebuke to complacency: the enemy isn’t fate, it’s drift. Read now, it lands as a proto-modern critique of passive living - less self-help than self-command, with the sharp confidence of someone who understood that character is built in the margins between grand declarations.