Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn vos Savant

Discomfort, here, is a social skill dressed up as fashion advice. Marilyn vos Savant’s line treats the necktie and slightly high heels as tiny, civilized ordeals: artifacts of formal life that ask you to perform composure even when your body is lobbying for rebellion. The verb “suffer” is doing a lot of work. It refuses the usual glamor language and names the transaction plainly: you trade physical ease for access, credibility, or simply not being the person who derails the evening with wardrobe drama.

The specificity matters. Not “pain” but “slightly” high heels; not a marathon but “an entire evening.” This isn’t a celebration of self-punishment. It’s a calibration of endurance, a reminder that adult public life still runs on small acts of restraint. “Without complaint or early removal” sharpens the intent: the point is not just to bear discomfort, but to avoid making it everyone else’s problem. That’s etiquette as emotional containment.

The subtext is also quietly gendered, and it’s savvy about that. By pairing a necktie with heels, vos Savant frames discomfort as a cross-gender requirement of dress codes, smoothing over the obvious asymmetry while still acknowledging that both are uniforms of seriousness. Contextually, it lands in a late-20th-century self-help register: competence isn’t only intellect; it’s the ability to manage the petty frictions that come with workplaces, dinners, and rituals of status. The quote works because it’s almost insultingly practical, implying that confidence sometimes starts with not yanking off your shoes under the table.