We are all just getting rid of our shackles: listen closely anywhere, even among honest and intellectual people, if such there be, and you can detect the rattle of chains.
The Disagreeable Girl's mind and soul have not kept pace with her body. Yesterday she was a slave, sold in Circassian mart, and freedom to her is so new and strange that she does not know what to do with it.
The tragedy she works, according to George Bernard Shaw, is through the fact that very often good men, blinded by the glamour of sex, imagine they love the Disagreeable Girl, when what they love is their own ideal.
Nature is both a trickster and a humorist and sets the will of the species beyond the discernment of the individual. The picador has to blindfold his horse in order to get him into the bull-ring, and likewise Dan Cupid exploits the myopic to a purpose.
For aught we know, the lovely Beatrice of Dante was only a Disagreeable Girl clothed in a poet's fancy. Fortunate, indeed, was Dante that he never knew her well enough to get undeceived, and so walked through life in love with love, sensitive, saintly, sweetly sad and divinely happy in his melancholy.
There be simple folks and many, who think that the tragedy of love lies in its being unrequited.
The fact is, the only genuinely unhappy love—the only tragedy—is when love wears itself out.
Thus tragedy consists in having your illusions shattered.
The love-story of Dante lies in the realm of illusion and represents an eternal type of affection. It is the love of a poet—a Pygmalion who loves his own creation. It is the love that is lost, but the things we lose or give away are the things we keep. That for which we clutch we lose.