Humility is the mother of giants.
Interpretation
True greatness comes from being humble and recognizing one's limitations.
This quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton highlights the importance of humility in achieving greatness. It suggests that humility is a foundational quality that fosters the growth of not only individuals but also the collective potential of society, as it encourages learning, openness, and connection with others.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal development, to emphasize the importance of maintaining humility.
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.
Lust indulged became habit, and habit unresisted became necessity.
Both now and for always, I intend to hold fast to my belief in the hidden strength of the human spirit.
A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.
There is nothing more hateful than bad advice.
Those who enter the gates of heaven are not beings who have no passions or who have curbed the passions, but those who have cultivated an understanding of them.
He who would search for pearls must dive below.
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