The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.
Interpretation
Those who are inexperienced often find joy and fulfillment in life because of their fresh perspective.
In this quote, Gilbert K. Chesterton suggests that the 'greenhorn' or the inexperienced individual has a unique advantage in life. Due to their lack of preconceptions and their openness to experience, they are more likely to fully engage with the world around them and, as a result, extract the greatest joy and lessons from their experiences. This highlights the value of curiosity and the willingness to learn in one's journey through life.
In practice
During a motivational speech about embracing new experiences.
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.
To be innocent is to be not guilty; but to be virtuous is to overcome our evil inclinations.
Remember that the good angels do what they can to preserve men from sin and obtain God's honor. But they do not lose courage when men fail.
The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.
One of the most beneficial of remedies is persisting in duβa.
In order to survive in a very small tribe, you needed to know how to do lots of things for yourself: how to make your tools, how to get food, and how to make your clothes - things most of us today don't need to know. The only thing I need to survive is to know history.
Creative scientists and saints expect revelation and do not fear it. Neither do children. But as we grow up and we are hurt, we learned not to trust.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.