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 mere physical man is like the ant crawling on the paper, who observes black lettering and attributes its production to the pen and nothing more.
Don't interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.
I was by birth a gentleman, living neither in any considerable height nor yet in obscurity.
I am one of billions. I am stardust gathered fleetingly into form. I will be ungathered. The stardust will go on to be other things someday and I will be free.
Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean's bottom.
Not he who has little, but he whose wishes more, is poor.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.