The man who kills a man kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.
Interpretation
Taking one's own life impacts not just the individual but also everyone around them.
This quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton delves into the profound implications of both murder and suicide. While killing another person is a tragic event affecting the victim and their loved ones, the act of suicide is depicted as a universal tragedy, erasing the unique contributions and connections of the individual to the broader world. Chesterton emphasizes how the loss of one person diminishes the collective human experience, suggesting a deep interconnectedness among all lives.
In practice
This quote could be used in a mental health awareness campaign to highlight the importance of seeking help.
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.
When people complain of life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things of it.
There has to be a common sense cutoff for craziness, and when that threshold is exceeded, then the criteria for publication should get far, far more stringent.
Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man.
Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.
For," I said, "a murdered man or woman dies not in God's time, but in Man's. He... or she... is cut short before he... or she... can atone for sin, and so all errors must be forgiven. When you think of it that way, all murderers are a gateway for heaven.
The life of faith is not a life of mounting up with wings, but a life of walking and not fainting.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.