Daily Inspiration Quote by Ninon de Lenclos

The observation turns on a social paradox: women are enjoined to be modest, yet they often prize in men the very quality that modesty suppresses, namely boldness. It exposes a double standard in which desire is channeled through asymmetric rules. Men are encouraged to assert, pursue, and risk; women are asked to withhold, demur, and conceal. Attraction, however, gravitates toward signs of agency and confidence. Boldness signals competence, resolve, and a willingness to stake reputation on desire. Modesty, when compulsory, renders women spectators to their own romantic lives while rewarding men for transgressing the same boundaries women must uphold.

Ninon de Lenclos wrote from the world of 17th-century French salons, where wit, seduction, and social maneuvering were arts. As a celebrated salonniere and libertine, she cultivated independence and challenged conventional morality. Her line is not a coy joke but a critique of how societies script courtship to preserve patriarchal order: a chaste ideal for women to guarantee lineage and a heroic ideal for men to validate power through conquest. In such a script, female modesty is not moral truth but strategy, and male boldness is not vice but adornment.

There is also an irony about desire itself. If women value boldness in men, it may be because boldness is the only force capable of cutting through a thicket of rules that forbid women from declaring their own wants. Boldness becomes both instrument and signal: the man who dares is also the man who will protect, provide, or defy convention on a woman’s behalf. Yet the same logic suggests what Lenclos practiced and implied: women, too, can be bold. The paradox points toward symmetry. If boldness vivifies love, then prescribing modesty to one sex and audacity to the other impoverishes both. To resolve the strangeness she names is to allow desire and dignity to be shared virtues, not rationed by gender.