The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.
Interpretation
True intelligence acknowledges one's limitations and ignorance.
In this quote, Chesterton highlights the paradox of intelligence. It suggests that a truly clever person realizes their own shortcomings and ignorance, recognizing that knowledge is vast and that everyone has areas where they may lack understanding. This awareness not only demonstrates humility but also the idea that wisdom comes from the acknowledgment of what we do not know.
In practice
This quote can be used in a philosophy class to spark a discussion about the nature of intelligence.
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 don't think of the past. The only thing that matters is the everlasting present.
If men, through fear, fraud, or mistake, should in terms renounce or give up any natural right, the eternal law of reason and the grand end of society would absolutely vacate such renunciation. The right to freedom being the gift of Almighty God, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.
No rock so hard but that a little wave may beat admission in a thousand years.
On the road halfway between faith and criticism stands the inn of reason. Reason is faith in what can be understood without faith, but it's still a faith, since to understand presupposes that there's something understandable.
Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence (which has no size).
From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.
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