In all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the duality of how men perceive women, seeing them as individual admirable beings but as a collective group, they invoke fear or disdain.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote speaks to the complex dynamics of gender perception where women are individually recognized for their greatness, yet when grouped together, may be viewed negatively or with suspicion. This paradox highlights societal attitudes towards femininity and the often contradictory nature of these perceptions, suggesting that cultural narratives may influence how individuals interpret the essence of womanhood in both positive and negative lights.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about gender stereotypes in literature.
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.
But, especially in love, only counterfeit emotions exist nowadays. We have all been taught to mistrust everybody emotionally, from parents downwards, or upwards. Donβt trust anybody with your real emotions: if youβve got any: that is the slogan of today. Trust them with your money, even, but never with your feelings. They are bound to trample on them.
A kid in an abusive home has far fewer rights than any POW. There is no Geneva Convention for kids.
Most African women are taught to endure abusive marriages. They say endurance means a good wife but most women endure abusive relationship because they are not empowered economically; they depend on their husbands.
We each have been betrayed. Let yourself picture and remember the many ways this is true. Feel the sorrow you have carried from this past. Now sense that you can release this burden of pain by gradually extending forgiveness as your heart is ready.
There were a lot of things I loved about working in a library, but mostly I miss the library patrons. I love books, but books are everywhere. Library patrons are as various and oddball and democratic as library books.
Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind.
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