Aging & Wisdom Quote by Stendhal

Stendhal lands the line like a sigh that’s sharpened into a blade: the modern condition isn’t suffering, it’s tedium so pervasive that even revolt feels routine. Calling it “the curse of our age” dresses boredom up as a historical force, not a personal failing. The jab is that novelty has been overproduced. When “even the strangest aberrations” can’t relieve the ache, transgression stops being liberation and becomes just another consumer good - a brief stimulus in a saturated market of sensations.

The word “aberrations” matters. It’s clinical, almost taxonomic, as if Stendhal is watching his contemporaries collect eccentricities the way they collect salons, scandals, and poses. He’s not condemning desire so much as diagnosing a culture that turns desire into performance. The implied target is a post-Revolutionary French society where old certainties (church, monarchy, stable hierarchies) have cracked, but the replacement isn’t meaning - it’s restless experimentation. Romantic excess, political lurches, social climbing, even moral misbehavior: all of it can read as an attempt to feel something durable.

Subtextually, he’s skeptical of the era’s self-dramatizing. If boredom is the baseline, then “strangeness” becomes a kind of arms race, escalating precisely because it’s doomed to fail. The line works because it flips the expected moral: the problem isn’t that people are too conservative to embrace the strange; it’s that the strange has become too available to matter. In Stendhal’s world, the real scandal is not vice but emptiness.