Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
Interpretation
Just because something is popular does not make it true or correct.
This quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton highlights the idea that popular beliefs or misconceptions, no matter how widely accepted, remain erroneous and should not be regarded as truths simply because they are in vogue. It draws attention to the danger of following trends without critical thinking, reminding us to maintain our analytical skills and discernment in the face of popular opinion.
In practice
This quote can be a powerful reminder during a debate or discussion about common misconceptions.
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.
Without cunning, there is no innovation. Without ambition, there is no accomplishment.
It is our decisions not our conditions that determine our quality of life.
There are two ways of exerting one's strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up.
In rare moments of deep play, we can lay aside our sense of self, shed time's continuum, ignore pain, and sit quietly in the absolute present, watching the world's ordinary miracles. No mind or heart hobbles. No analyzing or explaining. No questing for logic. No promises. No goals. No relationships. No worry. One is completely open to whatever drama may unfold.
The mintage of wisdom is to know that rest is rust, and that real life is love, laughter, and work.
Can you gather your vital breath and yet be tender like a newborn baby?
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