Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that rational thinkers who don't believe in gods claim that love for humanity is enough, but they might not genuinely possess that love.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote reflects on the notion that some thinkers reject belief in a higher power, claiming that love for humanity would suffice for their moral and existential needs. However, Chesterton implies that many of these thinkers fail to truly embody that love, indicating a deeper critique of their worldview. It raises questions about the nature of belief, love, and what ultimately sustains human compassion.
In practice
In a speech about compassion and empathy, this quote can be used to emphasize the importance of genuine love for humanity.
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.
People now live their lives like an open wound to be famous - they do bad things because they're rewarded for it.
Are you acquainted with the mood of mind in which, if you were seated alone, and the cat licking its kitten on the rug before you, you would watch the operation so intently that puss's neglect of one ear would put you seriously out of temper?
RITUALISM, n. A Dutch Garden of God where He may walk in rectilinear freedom, keeping off the grass.
Man makes holy what he believes as he makes beautiful what he loves.
So we reach into the raging chaos, and we cling to it, and we tell ourselves it has meaning, and that the world is good, and we are not evil, and we will all go home in the end.
The past is always - one moment it's what happened three minutes ago, and one minute it's what happened 30 years ago. And they flow into each other in ways that we can't predict and that we keep discovering in dreams, which keep bringing up feelings and moments, some of which we never actually saw.
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