The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that the true beauty of life lies in health and well-being, rather than in idealized forms of art or expression.
Gilbert K. Chesterton emphasizes that the most profound and poetic aspect of life is the simple state of health, highlighting that appreciating the ordinary, such as not being sick, embodies true beauty. This perspective encourages a recognition of the value in everyday existence and the often overlooked gift of wellness, suggesting that being healthy is itself a form of art.
In practice
During a speech on health awareness, this quote can highlight the importance of well-being in life.
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.
No man can be subject to any laws, excepting those which have received the assent of himself or his representatives and which are promulgated beforehand and applied legally.
Charity never humiliated him who profited from it, nor ever bound him by the chains of gratitude, since it was not to him but to God that the gift was made.
A man is not aware of his virtues (if any). Nevertheless, one hopes that they exist.
Ahimsa is the attribute of the soul, and therefore, to be practiced by everybody in all affairs of life. If it cannot be practiced in all departments, it has no practical value.
You are the patient one, Mademoiselle,' said Poirot to Miss Debenham. She shrugged her shoulders slightly. 'What else can one do?' You are a philosopher, Mademoiselle.' That implies a detached attitude. I think my attitude is more selfish. I have learned to save myself useless emotion.
Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that's real hunger.
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