The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that while secularists may reject the divine, they also destroy the values and institutions of the secular world.
Gilbert K. Chesterton reflects on the actions of secularists, suggesting that their attempts to challenge or dismiss the divine have ultimately led to a degradation of the secular realm itself. He draws a parallel to the Titans of mythology who, despite their great ambitions to scale heaven, merely caused destruction on earth. This serves as a commentary on the consequences of rejecting higher ideals without considering the ramifications for worldly affairs.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate about the role of secularism in modern society.
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.
When I sleep I turn into a wolf. Bran turned his face away and looked back out into the night. Do wolves dreams?
Anguish of mind has driven thousands to suicide; anguish of body, none. This proves that the health of the mind is of far more consequence to our happiness than the health of the body, although both are deserving of much more attention than either of them receive.
Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it.
You climb to reach the summit, but once there, discover that all roads lead down.
Someday, the realm of liberty and justice will encompass the planet. Freedom is not just the birthright of the few, it is the God-given right of all His children, in every country. It won't come by conquest. It will come, because freedom is right and freedom works. It will come, because cooperation and good will among free people will carry the day.
There is a grandeur in this view of life, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful are being evolved
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.