To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that marriage, like life, is a unique and singular experience that should be appreciated rather than regretted.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote uses the analogy of marriage to highlight the value and uniqueness of significant life experiences. By comparing the notion of being married only once to lamenting the fact that one has been born only once, he emphasizes that both marriage and life are irreplaceable and that one should embrace these experiences fully without dwelling on potential regrets.
In practice
During a wedding toast to celebrate the couple's unique bond.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
There are different ways that kids who are gay take on the rejection and alienation they feel. The way I dealt with it was to say, 'You know what? You're imposing judgments on me and condemnations, but I don't accept them. I'm going to instead turn the light on you and see what your flaws are and impose the same judgmental standards on you.'
I just think, as women, we have to give ourselves room to be individuals. So when a woman makes a decision for herself, we as women shouldn't set those hardcore boundaries for another woman. Just like we don't want men setting hardcore boundaries for us.
Don't you ever orget that in the end, our future is tied to people, that it's more about ideas than a tax.
Here's to woman! Would that we could fold into her arms without falling into her hands.
How many of us have conflicts with someone else- and how many of us pray for that person? We have individuals with whom we are competitive, or whom we dislike or have a quarrel with; but very few of us have true enemies in the martial sense. And yet if Lincoln could pray fervently- and contemporary reports indicate he did- for the people who were opposing him, how much more can we do for someone we just find a little irritating?
Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.
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