Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?
Interpretation
This quote suggests that fear may disguise ignorance, challenging the idea of who is truly enlightened.
In this quote, Chesterton presents a thought-provoking perspective on fear and ignorance. He suggests that those who are unafraid of the unknown—symbolized by 'devils in the dark'—might be perceived as foolish by others. Conversely, it raises the possibility that those who live in constant fear of the uncertain may be the true 'idiots', as their fears can blind them to knowledge and understanding. It encourages introspection regarding what fear means and how it influences our perceptions of reality.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about confronting fears.
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 was an orphan, I was the richest kid at the orphanage because everyone else was complaining about not having anything. But when I discovered that you could get two cents for a Coca-Cola bottle, I would follow people around who were drinking it and ask them if they were almost through with it.
We think we have to become something else to be satisfied, not realizing that being ourselves is the only thing that can satisfy us.
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and slower it is in arriving at maturity. A man reaches the maturity of his reasoning powers and mental faculties hardly before the age of twenty-eight; a woman at eighteen.
I do want to write again. I hope to. But it's also important for me to realize, as I get older, that I don't have to be doing everything all at once.
Man conquers the world by conquering himself.
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