A good joke is the closest thing we have to divine revelation.
Interpretation
A good joke can provide profound insights, similar to spiritual revelations.
Gilbert K. Chesterton suggests that humor, particularly a well-crafted joke, can reveal deep truths about life, humanity, and the world, much like divine revelations do. He highlights the power of laughter and cleverness in understanding and experiencing our existence, implying that humor can lead us to a greater understanding of ourselves and our surroundings.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of laughter in our lives.
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.
Laughter is a celebration of our failings. That's what clowns are for. And that's what I am.
Critics search for ages for the wrong word, which, to give them credit, they eventually find.
The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity
That is a society editor, sitting there elegantly dressed, with his legs crossed in that indolent way, observing the clothes the ladies wear, so that he can describe them for his paper and make them out finer than they are and get bribes for it and become wealthy.
Nothing like a little judicious levity.
There aren't many downsides to being rich, other than paying taxes and having relatives asking for money. But being famous, that's a 24 hour job right there.
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