Contemporary society has become dry, not for lack of wonders but for lack of wonder.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that modern society's lack of appreciation for the wonders around us leads to a dull existence.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote suggests that contemporary society suffers from a deficiency of wonder, not because there are no remarkable things to behold, but because people have become blind to the beauty and marvels that surround them. This reflects a broader philosophical concern regarding modernity, where distractions and mundane routines overshadow the awe inspired by nature, creativity, and life itself. To truly live, one must cultivate a sense of wonder and appreciation for the world.
In practice
In a speech about environmental awareness, one could invoke this quote to inspire people to appreciate the natural world.
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.
I'm interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice.
I can show you that the art of calculation has to do with odd and even numbers in their numerical relations to themselves and to each other.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
When the government violates the people's rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensible of duties.
It is their character indeed that makes people who they are. But it is by reason of their actions that they are happy or the reverse.
Meditation is an insight that all goals are false. Meditation is an understanding that desires don't lead anywhere. Seeing that... And this is not a belief that you can get from me or from Buddha or from Jesus. This is not knowledge; you will have to see it. You can see it right now!
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