Justice & Law Quote by Stendhal

Flattery is a fast track to self-destruction, Stendhal warns, and he chooses the language of damnation to make a social tactic sound like a moral catastrophe. “Paying court” isn’t simply politeness; it’s the old-world choreography of deference: trimming your opinions, laughing at the wrong jokes, letting power set the terms of your dignity. The threat isn’t that the powerful will punish you. It’s that you’ll collaborate in your own diminishment until you can’t tell where survival ends and servility begins.

Stendhal wrote in the long hangover of the French Revolution and Napoleon, an era when regimes flipped, loyalties were audited, and careerism could masquerade as prudence. In that climate, courting power looks rational, even necessary. His line punctures that rationalization. “Eternal ruin” suggests a loss that outlives any political season: the erosion of character, the permanent deformation of taste, the mind trained to anticipate what authority wants before it even asks. It’s a writer’s curse because it targets the one thing Stendhal valued as both aesthetic and ethical: independence of perception.

There’s cynicism here, but not the lazy kind. He’s diagnosing how power works best when it recruits people to police themselves. The subtext is brutally modern: once you start optimizing your life around proximity to the influential, you don’t just risk corruption; you make corruption your identity. The courtier gets rewards, sure, but pays with the only currency that can’t be earned back: a self that still belongs to itself.