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.
I always felt like the rug could be pulled out from under me at anytime. And coming from a racially mixed background, I always felt like I didn't really fit in anywhere.
Hospitality in the prairie country is not limited. Even if your enemy passes your way, you must feed him before you shoot him.
I'm a good son, a good father, a good husband - I've been married to the same woman for 30 years. I'm a good friend. I finished college, I have my education, I donate money anonymously. So when people criticize the kind of characters that I play on screen, I go, 'You know, that's part of history.'
Earnsha was not to be civilized with a wish, and my young lady was no philosopher, and no paragon of patience; but both their minds tending to the same point - one loving and desiring to esteem, and the other loving and desiring to be esteemed - they contrived in the end to reach it.
Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.
All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.
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