Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street.
Interpretation
Focus on genuine human experiences rather than superficial media representations.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote emphasizes the importance of connecting with and understanding real people and their experiences in everyday life, as opposed to being swayed by idealized or commercialized images presented in the media. It suggests that true beauty, struggle, and reality are found in the ordinary lives of individuals around us, rather than in the polished and often unrealistic depictions in illustrated papers and publications.
In practice
During a speech about authenticity in social media, one could use this quote to stress the importance of genuine connections.
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.
Live for this life as though you live in it forever and live for the life to come as though you die tomorrow.
All the evidence that we have indicates that it is reasonable to assume in practically every human being, and certainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse towards growth, or towards the actualization.
I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence.
The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of the rulers.
Environmental degradation, overpopulation, refugees, narcotics, terrorism, world crime movements, and organized crime are worldwide problems that don't stop at a nation's borders.
We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.
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