Posting a letter and getting married [sic] are among the few things left that are entirely romantic; for to be entirely romantic, a thing must be irrevocable
Interpretation
The quote suggests that true romance comes from actions that are permanent and unchangeable.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote implies that certain actions, such as posting a letter or getting married, embody a deep sense of romance due to their definitive and irreversible nature. These moments signify commitments that cannot be undone, highlighting the beauty in their permanence and the emotional weight they carry, which is essential to the experience of romance.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a wedding toast emphasizing the beauty of commitment.
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.
I don't particularly believe all love is doomed. But I guess, one is usually kinda suffering from some aborted love affair or association, rather than being at the peak of one. I think it's fairly obvious that a lot more suffering goes on in the name of love than the little happiness you can squeeze out of it.
When we are generous in welcoming people and sharing something with them-some food, a place in our homes, our time-not only do we no longer remain poor: we are enriched.
The prize of all too precious you.
This is what love does and continues to do. It tastes like honey to adults and milk to children.
What I want from my lovers is real, unadulterated love, and from my genuine workers I expect real work done.
There is that awful moment when you realize that you're falling in love. That should be the most joyful moment, and actually it's not. It's always a moment that's full of fear because you know, as night follows day, the joy is going to rapidly be followed by some pain or other. All the angst of a relationship.
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