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.
I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.
Absolute truth is not dependent upon public opinion or popularity. Now what is this truth? It is His gospel. It is the gospel of Jesus Christ.
I was thinking of my patients, and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of their own fate. It was not a matter of bad or good luck. When they could no longer blame fate, they were in despair.
There is not an acre of ground on the globe that is in possession of its rightful owner, or that has not been taken away from owner after owner, cycle afer cycle, by force and bloodshed.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
As long as a man thinks, this struggle must go on, and so long man must have some form of religion.
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