Art & Creativity Quote by Catherine the Great

"In my position you have to read when you want to write and to talk when you would like to read"

Catherine the Great, Royalty

About this Quote

Power, Catherine suggests, is an extrovert’s tax on an introvert’s pleasures. The line is funny because it’s framed like a mild scheduling complaint when it’s really a diagnosis of rule: the sovereign’s attention is always being rented out. Reading and writing are the private arts of control - you set the pace, you choose the voices, you decide what becomes law on the page. Talking, by contrast, is the public performance of control, and it’s where a monarch’s autonomy gets negotiated away in real time by courtiers, ministers, petitioners, and foreign envoys.

The syntax does a lot of the political work. “Have to” lands with bureaucratic inevitability, not melodrama. “When you want” and “when you would like” sharpen the irony: even desire is rationed. She isn’t confessing weakness; she’s naming a structural constraint of authority. A ruler may be absolute on paper, but her day is not. It’s dictated by audiences, protocol, and the endless management of impressions.

Context matters. Catherine styled herself as an Enlightenment sovereign, corresponding with philosophers, drafting the Nakaz, collecting books, and cultivating the image of a thinker-queen. That makes the complaint sharper: the very identity she’s building depends on solitude and text, yet her job requires speech - the least reliable medium, the easiest to twist, the most vulnerable to being overheard and weaponized. Subtext: the state runs on interruptions, and even an empress has to do her thinking off-hours.

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Catherine the Great

Catherine the Great (April 21, 1729 - November 6, 1796) was a Royalty from Russia.

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