I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
Gilbert K. ChestertonRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Tradition keeps the memories of the past alive and relevant in the present.
In this quote, Chesterton emphasizes the importance of tradition not as a stagnant force but as a vital connection between the past and the present. He suggests that the deeds of historical figures like Penn and Franklin continue to influence contemporary life and uphold values that shape our identity, in contrast to a rapidly changing environment where recent actions may seem insignificant.
Themes
TraditionHistoryMemoryIdentityChange
In practice
Example use cases
During a commencement speech, one might refer to this quote to illustrate the importance of history in shaping future leaders.
More from Gilbert K. Chesterton
All quotes →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.
Gilbert K. ChestertonRead
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.
Gilbert K. ChestertonRead
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.
Gilbert K. ChestertonRead
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.
Gilbert K. ChestertonRead
There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.
Gilbert K. ChestertonRead
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