If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue.
Interpretation
Prosperity reflects one's moral character and integrity.
In this quote, Chesterton suggests that when prosperity is seen as a just reward for virtuous behavior, it becomes a marker of one's moral standing. It implies that true wealth is not merely about material gain, but is intertwined with oneβs ethical actions and virtues, influencing how society perceives and values prosperity.
In practice
In a discussion about ethics in business, one could cite this quote to emphasize the importance of integrity alongside profit.
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.
Small acts of decency ripple in ways we could never imagine.
Freud was way off base in considering sex the fundamental motivation. The ruling passion in men is minding each other's business.
The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man.
A good conscience fears no witness, but a guilty conscience is solicitous even in solitude. If we do nothing but what is honest, let all the world know it. But if otherwise, what does it signify to have nobody else know it, so long as I know it myself? Miserable is he who slights that witness.
Each of us must turn inward and destroy in himself all that he thinks he ought to destroy in others.
Men live their lives trapped in an eternal present, between the mists of memory and the sea of shadow that is all we know of the days to come.
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