If a man does not talk to himself, it is because he is not worth talking to.
Interpretation
Talking to oneself can indicate self-reflection and worthiness of one's own thoughts.
This quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton suggests that engaging in self-dialogue is a sign of introspection and self-valuation. It implies that if a person does not communicate with themselves, perhaps they lack the understanding or depth that makes their thoughts meaningful or valuable. Thus, the act of talking to oneself can be seen as a critical component of personal worth and cognitive engagement.
In practice
In a motivational speech about the importance of self-talk for personal growth.
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.
Speak only endearing speech, speech that is welcomed. Speech, when it brings no evil to others, is pleasant.
His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing, yet avoided.
I believe many people feel like God is mad at them. One day I put a post on Facebook that said, 'God is not mad at you.' Within a few hours, we literally had thousands of positive responses from people saying things like, 'That is exactly what I needed to hear today.' Obviously, this is a message we need to hear.
Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.
We all learn lessons in life. Some stick, some don't. I have always learned more from rejection and failure than from acceptance and success.
Appearance is something absolute, but reality is not that way - everything is interdependent, not absolute. So that view is very helpful to maintain a peace of mind because the main destroyer of a peaceful mind is anger.
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