The golden age only comes to men when they have forgotten gold.
Interpretation
True fulfillment comes when we let go of material desires.
This quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton suggests that true happiness and a 'golden age' in life can only be achieved when individuals prioritize values beyond material wealth. It emphasizes the idea that a focus on spiritual, intellectual, and emotional riches leads to a more fulfilling life, while an obsession with gold and materialism can distract from what truly matters.
In practice
A motivational speaker could use this quote to emphasize the importance of living a value-driven life over a materialistic one.
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.
When I was young, I believed that life might unfold in an orderly way, according to my hopes and expectations. But now I understand that the Way winds like a river, always changing, ever onward.. My journeys revealed that the Way itself creates the warrior; that every path leads to peace, every choice to wisdom. And that life has always been, and will always be, arising in Mystery.
Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?
With all their faults, trade-unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed.
Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored. I feel I have lived long enough. I am leaving you with your worries in this sweet cesspool. Good luck.
The art of war is of vital importance to the state. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.
Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.
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