Daily Inspiration Quote by Emily Murphy

Courtship, in Murphy's framing, is a rigged conversational economy: men spend lavishly in language, women pay in attention. The line lands because it pretends to be a breezy anthropological universal ("all the world over") while quietly smuggling in a critique of gendered power. "All tongue" isn't just flirtation; it's performance, persuasion, and the socially sanctioned right to narrate reality. "All ears" isn't simply receptiveness; it's training in restraint, in being the audience rather than the author.

Murphy was an activist working in an era when women's public speech was policed and their civic agency contested. Against that backdrop, the quote reads less like romantic comedy and more like a micro-theory of how patriarchy reproduces itself through everyday rituals. Courtship becomes the rehearsal room for marriage and public life: he practices selling a self; she practices consenting to the terms, absorbing the pitch, learning what not to say. The aphorism's bite comes from its symmetry: tongue/ears makes the pairing sound natural, even bodily fated, which is exactly what Murphy wants you to notice and resist. If it feels like "just how it is", that's the trap.

There's also a double edge. Murphy risks flattening women into passivity even as she exposes the role, reflecting the reform-era tension between critiquing constraints and reinforcing stereotypes to make the critique legible. The line endures because it names a familiar script and makes it slightly embarrassing to keep performing.