You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
Interpretation
The quote implies that gratitude should be expressed in all aspects of life, not just before meals.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote emphasizes the importance of gratitude and mindfulness in every activity we engage in, not limited to just saying grace before meals. He suggests that every moment, whether it be a concert, a book, or even creative endeavors like painting and sketching, can benefit from a moment of appreciation, highlighting a philosophy of living with intention and thankfulness.
In practice
Using this quote during a speech about the importance of creativity and mindfulness in everyday life.
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 don't paint to live, I live to paint.
I've returned to being an amateur without any ties or strings attached, which gives me a freedom I never had before.
Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.
I've never seen the devil create music.
One must withdraw for a time from life in order to set down that picture.
Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump.
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