Life & Wisdom Quote by Ninon de L'Enclos

Beauty, here, is a moral verdict, not an aesthetic opinion. Ninon de L'Enclos flips the usual hierarchy: the eye may be seduced by what is "striking and beautiful", but seduction is exactly the problem. "Striking" carries the charge of spectacle, novelty, even danger - the kind of charisma that lands cleanly in a salon and then corrodes you in private. The first clause is a warning about surface power: what dazzles can also manipulate, distract, or simply be empty. She is writing against the social economy of appearances where polish, wit, and fashion often pass for virtue.

Then she makes the bolder move: "that which is good is always beautiful". It's not naive; it's polemical. De L'Enclos was a famous salonniere and a woman negotiating a culture eager to reduce women to ornament or scandal. By insisting that goodness generates beauty, she claims a different authority: not the beauty men collect, but the beauty that emerges from character, generosity, fidelity to reason. The subtext is a counter-weapon to a world that praises women for being looked at and punishes them for being whole.

The line works because it refuses compromise. It concedes that aesthetics can mislead, then asserts an almost scandalous certainty about ethics: goodness is intrinsically attractive, whether or not it announces itself with glamour. In a courtly society built on performance, that reads less like a platitude and more like a provocation - a demand to judge people by the aftertaste, not the first impression.