Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that true self-worth comes from humility rather than arrogance.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote implies that those who believe themselves to be superior or significant often lack genuine understanding of their own limitations. In contrast, the truly wise and humble individuals recognize their place in the grand scheme of things, embracing a sense of humility that is often overlooked by those who flaunt their importance.
In practice
During a leadership workshop to emphasize the importance of 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.
I want to hear an alternative viewpoint, and I don't want girls to be defanged and declawed and pretty and mute.
He knew how to say many false things that were like true sayings.
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
We believe that all men are created equal because they are created in the image of God
Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.
No one who errs unwillingly is evil.
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