Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.
Interpretation
Chastity is not merely avoidance of sexual immorality, but is a passionate commitment to a noble ideal.
In this quote, Chesterton asserts that chastity transcends simple abstention from sexual acts deemed wrong. Instead, he compares it to the fervent spirit and bravery of Joan of Arc, suggesting that true chastity involves a powerful dedication to higher principles and ideals, evoking a sense of passion and integrity rather than mere restraint.
In practice
During a seminar on personal values, one might quote Chesterton to emphasize the importance of living with passionate integrity.
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.
Here are some passing thoughts. Imagine looking up at the moon and seeing it burning. Imagine seeing the grocery storeβs checkout girl grow horns. Imagine growing younger instead of older. Imagine feeling more powerful and more capable of falling in love with life every new day instead of being scared and sick and not knowing whether to stay under a sheet or venture forth into the cold.
The Gods give with one hand and take with the other.
Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and donβt care to know any more.
But if by some miracle and all our struggle, the earth is spared, only justice to every living being will save humankind.
I have not slept. Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream: The Genius and the mortal instruments Are then in council; and the state of man, Like to a little kingdom, suffers then The nature of an insurrection.
So many things I had thought forgotten Return to my mind with stranger pain: Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago.
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