A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense really becomes uncommon.
Interpretation
A lack of common sense indicates a decline in societal values and reasoning.
This quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton suggests that when common sense is no longer prevalent in society, it signifies a period of decay, be it final or transitional. It emphasizes the importance of rational thought and practical judgment as foundations for a healthy society, indicating that societal well-being relies on shared understanding and sensible decision-making among its members.
In practice
When discussing the decline of civic responsibility in modern times.
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.
Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people.
The higher culture an individual attains, the less field there is left for mockery and scorn.
Haldane was engaged in discussion with an eminent theologian. "What inference," asked the latter, "might one draw about the nature of God from a study of his works?" Haldane replied: "An inordinate fondness for beetles."
The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves. The self-respecting individual will try to be as tolerant of his neighbor's shortcomings as he is of his own.
Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.
Every one of us has a bad conscience, which he tries to escape by going to sleep as quickly as possible.
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