People talk of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the societal expectations of women, particularly the distinction between beauty and the essence of womanhood.
Gilbert K. Chesterton highlights a profound irony in how society views women. While plain women may experience a sense of pity for their perceived failures, it is perhaps even more tragic for a beautiful woman to excel in many aspects of life yet still fall short of fulfilling the core essence of womanhood, which encompasses qualities such as nurture, compassion, and emotional connection. The quote invites readers to consider the deeper emotional and social implications of beauty and success, beyond mere appearances.
In practice
In a discussion about gender roles in a women's empowerment seminar.
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.
Who is there that can adequately gauge the greatness of the humility, gentleness, self-surrender, revealed by the Lord of majesty in assuming human nature, in accepting the punishment of death, the shame of the cross?
What is the ideal for mental health, then? A lived, compelling illusion that does not lie about life, death, and reality; one honest enough to follow its own commandments: I mean, not to kill, not to take the lives of others to justify itself.
There is no sickness worse for me than words that to be kind must lie.
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Keep things at arm's length... If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to.
To insult someone we call him 'bestial. For deliberate cruelty and nature, 'human' might be the greater insult.
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