I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.
Interpretation
The quote explores the cyclical nature of generational conflict and the misguided beliefs held by both the old and young.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote addresses the perpetual clash between generations, suggesting that the older generation clings to outdated customs while the younger generation, in their quest for change, often adopts theories that are equally flawed. This dynamic highlights the difficulties in understanding each other's perspectives, as both sides are trapped in their own misunderstandings and presumptions. Thus, Chesterton reflects on the inevitability of disagreement between youth and age, implying that change and continuity both come with their own shortcomings.
In practice
In a discussion about social change during a family gathering.
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.
there they laugh: they do not understand me; I am not the mouth for these ears.
We stumble on, thinks Jaslyn, bring a little noise into the silence, find in others the ongoing of ourselves. It is almost enough.
Can the mind see the truth of its own incapacity to know the unknown? Surely if I see very clearly that my mind cannot know the unknown, there is absolute quietness.
The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.
The human soul, provided it is pure and strong enough, can contact the unseen in waking life as well as in dreams: all that is required is withdrawal of the soul from the tumult of sensory life.
May I not seem to have lived in vain.
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