People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.
Interpretation
Orthodoxy is often viewed as mundane, but it is actually a source of profound excitement and sanity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton suggests that the common perception of orthodoxy as unexciting and safe is misguided. Instead, he argues that adherence to orthodoxy is both thrilling and full of risk, as it demands a certain level of sanity that is far more intense and engaging than the chaos of madness.
In practice
In a debate about traditional values versus modern beliefs, one might quote Chesterton to emphasize the value of orthodoxy.
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.
A man may be a Bah' in name only. If he is a Bah' in reality, his deeds and actions will be decisive proofs of it. What are the requirements? Love for mankind, sincerity toward all, reflecting the oneness of the world of humanity, philanthropy, becoming enkindled with the fire of the love of God, attainment to the knowledge of God and that which is conducive to human welfare.
Travelling is almost like talking with those of other centuries.
All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.
I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.
If nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little.
Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.
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