Life & Wisdom Quote by Natalie Clifford Barney

A polite society stocked with "well-thinking" people is Barney's idea of an intellectual terrarium: orderly, cultivated, and quietly suffocating. The barb lands because "well-thinking" sounds like praise until you hear its real job description: thinking in the approved way, at the approved volume, with the approved conclusions. Barney flips the compliment into an accusation. The wish that they be replaced by "thinking ones" is less a call for smarter opinions than for actual cognition - curious, unruly, and willing to risk social disapproval.

The line works as social critique because it targets a specific kind of moral vanity: the person who confuses correctness with consciousness. "Well-thinking" is ideology dressed as manners; it performs virtue rather than pursuing truth. Barney's substitution is surgical: keep the appearance of reason, discard the conformity. It's a call to trade reputational safety for mental integrity.

Context sharpens the intent. Barney was a salonniere and modernist author moving through Parisian circles where taste and "good sense" could operate as gatekeeping - especially against women, queerness, and aesthetic experimentation. In that world, being "well-thinking" often meant being safely legible to power. Her phrasing also carries a faint Swiftian wishfulness ("Would that..."), a mock-prayer that exposes how entrenched the problem is: if independent thought were common, she wouldn't need to petition for it.

It's a small sentence with a big hinge: from thinking as social signaling to thinking as lived practice.