When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.
Interpretation
Breaking major rules does not lead to freedom but rather to more minor restrictions.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote suggests that violating significant laws does not result in the liberation one might expect, but instead leads to an array of lesser regulations. This underscores the idea that societal order is maintained through both major and minor laws, and that rebellion against the larger frameworks may ultimately lead to more constraints rather than genuine freedom or chaos.
In practice
This quote could be used in a debate about the implications of breaking laws in society.
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.
So she was considering in her own mind...whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up & picking the daisies.
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past
Form follows profit is the aesthetic principle of our times.
Of her own experience she had no memory of the thing happening; but in her instinct, which was the experience of all mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory of fathers that had eaten their new-born and helpless progeny.
All other ways of mortification are vain, all helps leave us helpless; it must be done by the Spirit.
There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
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