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.
The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.
Work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons
My main ambition as a historian is to figure out what's really happening in the world, instead of the fictions that humans have been creating for thousands of years in order to explain or control what's happening in the world.
He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out the open door at the moon and unrolled his trousers and put them on.
Whenever A annoys or injures B on the pretense of saving or improving X, A is a scoundrel.
The most mediocre of males feels himself a demigod as compared with women.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.