Parenting & Family Quote by Malcolm De Chazal

A neat couplet like this is built to feel like wisdom, then quietly needle you for taking it at face value. De Chazal sets up a flattering hierarchy of inspiration: women as the spark of lyric intensity, children as the trigger for big, abstract questions. It works because it compresses two large experiences - desire and responsibility - into two prestigious identities, “poet” and “philosopher,” and lets the reader step into both without admitting the messier parts.

The subtext, though, is pointedly adult and pointedly male. “Women make us poets” leans on the old idea of woman-as-muse: she doesn’t write; she is written. It’s an erotic economy where the man’s interiority becomes art and the woman’s personhood becomes catalyst. “Children make us philosophers” shifts from romance to time: a child forces you to reckon with causality, morality, mortality, the long game. Philosophy here isn’t classroom argument; it’s the anxious recalibration that happens when your choices suddenly echo into someone else’s life.

Context matters. De Chazal, a Mauritian writer with an aphorist’s taste for the paradox, loved the form that sounds definitive while leaving room for dispute. The line’s elegance is also its provocation: it invites admiration, then invites critique. Read now, it doubles as a snapshot of 20th-century gendered imagination - and a reminder that “insight” can be both a beam of clarity and a beautifully phrased blind spot.