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.
Don't you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn't marry a girl just because she's pretty, but my goodness, doesn't it help?
Everybody wants respect. In their own way, three-year-olds would like respect, and acknowledgment, in their terms.
I certainly should have,' he agrees, smiling and thinking what an absurd and universally-accepted bit of nonsense it is, that your best friends must necessarily be the ones who best understand you. As if there weren't far too much understanding in the world already; above all, that understanding between lovers, celebrated in song and story, which is actually such torture that no two of them can bear it without frequent separations or fights.
To find yourself jilted is a blow to your pride. Do your best to forget it and if you don't succeed, at least pretend to.
Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can't figure out what from.
There are very fundamental reasons we live our lives in social networks, and if we really understood the role they're playing in our society, we would take better care of social networks and find ways to take advantage of their power to improve our society.
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