Life & Wisdom Quote by Natalie Clifford Barney

"Renouncement: the heroism of mediocrity" is Barney at her most surgical: a single colon that turns a lofty virtue into a social diagnosis. Renunciation is usually framed as spiritual muscle, the brave refusal of appetite. Barney flips it. In her view, giving things up often isn’t strength at all; it’s a way to launder timidity into moral prestige. The trick is rhetorical: she doesn’t attack heroism, she attacks the cheap imitation of it - the kind available to anyone unwilling to risk desire, ambition, or scandal.

The subtext carries the scent of salons and sermons, of a culture that rewards restraint because restraint is controllable. Renouncement becomes a medal you can earn without ever testing yourself, a performance of virtue that conveniently avoids the vulnerability of wanting. Mediocrity, here, isn’t just lack of talent; it’s a strategy. If you never reach, you never fail. If you never act, you can claim purity.

Barney’s context matters. As a queer modernist and salonniere who built a life around art, flirtation, and transgressive freedom, she had little patience for moral systems that turn abstention into superiority. Her Parisian milieu prized wit and experimentation, while mainstream respectability often demanded silence, sacrifice, and a tasteful shrinking of the self. The line reads like a provocation tossed across a drawing-room: don’t confuse refusal with courage. Sometimes the bravest act is not renouncing, but choosing - and living with the consequences.