It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted and only a few things forbidden.
Interpretation
Most actions are allowed, while only a few are restricted, making it easier to list prohibitions.
This quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton highlights the nature of rules and permissions in life. It suggests that human behavior is predominantly free and that restrictions are the exception rather than the rule, which reflects on the broader ideas of liberty and societal structure, emphasizing that while we are allowed to do many things, a few prohibitions shape our understanding of morality and ethics.
In practice
In a speech about personal liberties and societal rules.
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.
And there we all were, as invisible as you could wish to see.
We live in a society in which it is normal to be sick; and sick to be abnormal.
What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
Every person born in this world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique.
Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.
We do not want to be reminded that it is we, the indigenous people, who are poor and exploited in the land of our birth. These are concepts which the Black Consciousness approach wishes to eradicate from the black man's mind before our society is driven to chaos by irresponsible people from Coca-cola and hamburger cultural backgrounds.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.