Life & Wisdom Quote by Jose Bergamin

Bergamin’s line lands like a compliment and then quietly turns the knife. On its surface, it flatters women with the authority of “answer,” positioning them as resolution, meaning, completion. But the syntax gives the game away: man gets to be the open-ended “question” - active, searching, entitled to curiosity - while woman is cast as the thing that satisfies it. That old metaphysical romance is also an old power arrangement.

The second sentence tightens the trap. “The mistake women make today” frames female behavior as an error in etiquette, not a rational response to social incentives. “Offer themselves” isn’t neutral: it implies self-marketing, availability, even a kind of moral impropriety. And “before being questioned” restores the male prerogative of interrogation. In Bergamin’s world, legitimacy arrives through being asked, chosen, summoned. A woman who steps forward without the ritual of male inquiry is not liberated; she’s out of turn.

Context matters: Bergamin wrote from early-20th-century Spain’s Catholic-tinged intellectual milieu, where gender was often treated as symbolism rather than lived experience, and where modernity (women in public life, new forms of courtship, political participation) was frequently coded as disorder. The aphorism performs a conservative sleight of hand: it borrows the language of reverence to reassert a hierarchy. It works because it sounds like wisdom - compact, paradoxical, elegant - while smuggling in a warning about women who refuse to wait their turn.