Properly speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a return to nature, because there is no such thing as a departure from it. The phrase reminds one of the slightly intoxicated gentleman who gets up in his own dining room and declares firmly that he must be getting home.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that humans are always part of nature, implying that a return is an illusion.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote reflects on the inherent relationship between humans and nature, stating that the concept of returning to nature is flawed because we never truly depart from it. This metaphor highlights a paradoxical view that even when we feel disconnected from our natural surroundings, we are intrinsically linked to them, much like the intoxicated gentleman who mistakenly believes he must leave his own home to feel at 'home.'
In practice
This quote can be used in an environmental discussion highlighting our bond with nature.
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 is not aware of his virtues (if any). Nevertheless, one hopes that they exist.
Passion is what gives sense to our life.
The God of life summons us to life; more, to be lifegivers, especially toward those who lie under the heel of the powers.
Dreaming is a philogenetically older mode of thought.
The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.
To be born in India is to arrive into the world swimming in religion.
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