There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.
Interpretation
Love is essential for recognizing the beauty in others.
In this quote, Chesterton highlights the transformative power of love, suggesting that attributes often deemed lovable or beautiful may only be fully appreciated through the act of loving them first. The quote invites us to consider how our perceptions of beauty and worth are shaped by our willingness to embrace and accept others, regardless of their outward appearances or flaws.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of empathy in relationships.
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.
The life so brief, the art so long in the learning, the attempt so hard, the conquest so sharp, the fearful joy that ever slips away so quickly - by all this I mean love, which so sorely astounds my feeling with its wondrous operation, that when I think upon it I scarce know whether I wake or sleep.
The life that goes out in love to all life is the life that is full, and rich, and continually expanding in beauty and in power.
I can elect something I love and absorb myself in it.
In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression.
Love has the patience to endure the fault it sees but cannot cure.
We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies.
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