Life & Wisdom Quote by Stendhal

Nothing dates faster than what tries hardest not to. Stendhal’s jab lands because it flips the expected pecking order: “nobility” isn’t praised as timeless refinement; it’s indicted as a form of literary vanity that petrifies on contact with the future.

The line is built on a deliciously cold paradox. “Nobility of their style” sounds like the highest compliment in a culture trained to worship elevated prose, good taste, the well-bred sentence. Stendhal uses that prestige word as a poison pill. He’s pointing at a specifically 19th-century French temptation: to write as if you’re wearing formal attire for an imagined salon, not speaking to readers with blood in their veins. Style becomes a social signal - a claim to class, seriousness, “proper” feeling. That’s exactly what makes it perishable.

The time math is the knife. Writers of 1840, unreadable by 1880: not because language changes, but because pose gets exposed. Stendhal is betting on modernity - on the idea that audiences eventually prefer precision to pomp, psychological truth to rhetorical upholstery. There’s also a sly self-positioning: he casts himself as the one who can see past the period’s etiquette and its literary careerism. What looks noble now will look like costume drama later.

Underneath, it’s an argument about honesty. When prose is engineered to impress, it stops transmitting experience and starts performing it. The future, Stendhal suggests, has a ruthless ear for performance.