Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that a light-hearted approach to life allows for greater freedom and joy.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote reflects the idea that taking oneself too seriously can weigh a person down, whereas a light-hearted attitude opens up possibilities for happiness and transcendence. By comparing human behavior to that of angels, he implies that those who embrace humor and a carefree spirit can navigate life's challenges with grace and ease.
In practice
Use this quote in a motivational speech about the importance of maintaining a positive attitude.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
Women observe subconsciously a thousand little details, without knowing they are doing so. Their subconscious mind adds these little things together - and they call the result intuition.
There are no limitations to the mind except those we acknowledge.
Rashness succeeds often, still more often fails.
If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting.
Knowledge is love and light and vision.
The possibilities of creative effort connected with the subconscious mind are stupendous and imponderable. They inspire one with awe.
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