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.
There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.
Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.
Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.
How do you know that you are not part of a book? That someone's not reading your story right now?
The art of living lies not in eliminating but in growing with troubles.
Some claim a place in the list of patriots, by an acrimonious and unremitting opposition to the court. This mark is by no means infallible. Patriotism is not necessarily included in rebellion. A man may hate his king, yet not love his country.
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