It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention, or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire. The creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex; they can breed thoughts.
Interpretation
The interplay between tradition and innovation ignites creativity and thought.
Gilbert K. Chesterton highlights the dynamic relationship between tradition and invention, suggesting that true creativity emerges from the friction between established beliefs and new ideas. Just as the complexity of sexuality can lead to new life, so too can complex ideas foster the birth of innovative thoughts in the human mind.
In practice
In a discussion about the role of art in society, one might say, 'As Chesterton once stated, it is the friction of tradition and invention that ignites creativity.'
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.
Sympathy with joy intensifies the sum of sympathy in the world, sympathy with pain does not really diminish the amount of pain.
If you fall in love with an idea, you won't see the merits of alternative approaches-and will probably miss an opportunity or two. One of life's great pleasures is letting go of a previously cherished idea. Then you're free to look for new ones. What part of your idea are you in love with? What would happen if you kissed it goodbye?
Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back.
My father used to say that if a man fools you once, he's a jerk. If he fools you twice, you're a jerk. Only he didn't use the word "jerk."
The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
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