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.
Basically, I feel fortunate to have realized what the goal is in life. There's no point in dying having gone through your life without knowing who you are, what you are, or what the purpose of life is. And that's all it is.
In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.
You are awareness disguised as a human being.
Non-violence is not a quality to be evolved or expressed to order. It is an inward growth depending for sustenance upon intense individual effort.
We could cope—the world could cope—with a Jesus who ultimately remains a wonderful idea inside his disciples' minds and hearts. The world cannot cope with a Jesus who comes out of the tomb, who inaugurates God's new creation right in the middle of the old one.
Confidence alone does not make peace, but acknowledging rights and confidence do. Failure to recognize these rights creates a sense of injustice; it keeps the embers burning under the ashes.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.