When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the idea that true appreciation for something encompasses both its clear qualities and its mysterious, less tangible aspects.
Gilbert K. Chesterton suggests that when we truly worship or admire something, our affection is not limited to what is easily understood or visible; instead, we also embrace its complexities and the elements that remain unknown. This duality between clarity and obscurity emphasizes the depth of our appreciation and the joy found in the mysteries of existence, which can enhance our emotional connection to the object of our reverence.
In practice
In a speech about art, one might use this quote to highlight how the unseen elements contribute to its beauty.
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 fragrance of flowers spreads only in the direction of the wind. But the goodness of a person spreads in all directions.
A person is either himself or not himself; is either rooted in his existence or is a fabrication; has either found his humanhood or is still playing with masks and roles and status symbols. And nobody is more aware of this difference (although unconsciously) than a child. Only an authentic person can evoke a good response in the core of the other person; only person is resonant to person.
Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.
It was among farmers and potato diggers and old men in workhouses and beggars at my own door that I found what was beyond these and yet farther beyond that drawingroom poet of my childhood in the expression of love, and grief, and the pain of parting, that are the disclosure of the individual soul.
Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you-because you know how to perform them-have no choice, either
It is said that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. It may well be that a war neurosis stirred up by propaganda of fear and hatred is the prelude to destruction.
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