Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that one should be cautious in calling upon higher powers, as they may respond in unexpected ways, often leading to annoyance.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote humorously implies that invoking divine powers is not something to be taken lightly. When one calls upon the gods, there may be unforeseen consequences that could lead to annoyance for those higher beings, thereby cautioning against frivolous or insincere prayers or requests.
In practice
Using this quote in a speech about the importance of serious intent in one's desires.
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.
BEGGAR, n. One who has relied on the assistance of his friends.
Wine makes a man more pleased with himself; I do not say it makes him more pleasing to others.
Don't stay in bed, unless you can make money in bed.
People say I'm difficult and sometimes that's a badge of honour.
What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps one in a continual state of inelegance.
When humor go's, there go's civilization.
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