Disguise our bondage as we will, 'Tis woman, woman, rules us still.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that women hold a significant influence over men, regardless of any attempts to disguise or deny it.
Thomas Moore's quote reflects the enduring power dynamics in relationships, highlighting how the presence and influence of women can guide and control men, even when this influence is not openly acknowledged. It indicates that male experiences and decisions are often swayed by female perspectives and emotions, thereby emphasizing the importance and strength of women's role in society.
In practice
This quote can be shared in discussions about gender roles at a conference.
When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.
Humility, that low, sweet root, from which all heavenly virtues shoot.
How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.
Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames.
And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.
Bastard Freedom waves Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves.
When I think about [characters], I like to think of them in their relationships to each other. In the same way, I think that's how humans are ultimately defined. We are our relationships to one another. And a lot of what's interesting about us happens in the context of other people.
One of life's terrible truths is that women like guys who seem to know what they're doing.
Strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than those who are most content.
Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.
For just as some people want a purely spiritual Christ, without flesh and without the cross, they also want their interpersonal relationships provided by sophisticated equipment, by screens and systems which can be turned on and off on command. Meanwhile, the Gospel tells us constantly to run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence which challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy which infects us in our close and continuous interaction.
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