Paradox - Truth standing on her head to get attention.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that truth often appears unusual or counterintuitive in order to capture people's interest.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote highlights the idea that truth can sometimes be obscured by its unconventional presentation. It suggests that to gain attention or provoke thought, truth might present itself in an unexpected way, turning conventional wisdom upside down. This paradox invites people to reconsider their perspectives and encourages deeper exploration of what is deemed true.
In practice
During a lecture on the nature of truth, one might use this quote to spark discussion.
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.
Swans sing before they die - 'twere no bad thing should certain persons die before they sing.
The chain that's fixed to the throne of Jove, On which the fabric of our world depends, One link dissolved, the whole creation ends.
A goodly portly man, i' faith, and a corpulent; of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage; and, as I think, his age some fifty, or, by'r Lady, inclining to threescore; and now I remember me, his name is Falstaff.
Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.
No method of procedure has ever been devised by which liberty could be divorced from local self-government. No plan of centralization has ever been adopted which did not result in bureaucracy, tyranny, inflexibility, reaction, and decline.
Today the two hundred million men in our country are entering into a civilized new world...but we, the two hundred million women, are still kept down in the dungeon.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.