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.
Dad had a way of disarming people because he never really directly attacked them. He might attack a principle, but he never attacked the individual.
Thus with hir fader for a certeyn space_x000D_ _x000D_ Dwelleth this flour of wyfly pacience,_x000D_ _x000D_ That neither by hir wordes ne hir face_x000D_ _x000D_ Biforn the folk, ne eek in her absence,_x000D_ _x000D_ Ne shewed she that hir was doon offence.
Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.
Something of the hermit's temper is an essential element in many forms of excellence, since it enables men to resist the lure of popularity, to pursue important work in spite of general indifference or hostility, and arrive at opinions which are opposed to prevalent errors.
I'm going to have to be impressed and feel confident in the people I'm handing a book to - or I'm not going to do it. Once you hand it to them, you're out. You have no control over it.
The preaching of divines helps to preserve well-inclined men in the course of virtue, but seldom or ever reclaims the vicious.
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