A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that while we may understand angels through divine revelation, the true essence of a turkey remains a mystery.
Gilbert K. Chesterton uses the turkey as a metaphor to convey that some aspects of life and existence are incomprehensible or enigmatic, unlike angels which have been partially revealed to humanity. The quote invites reflection on the complexities of understanding the world around us, suggesting that certain things, like the nature of a turkey, leave us with more questions than answers, thus emphasizing the mystery inherent in life itself.
In practice
During a philosophical discussion on the nature of existence, this quote can illustrate the limits of our understanding.
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.
A man whose life has been dishonourable is not entitled to escape disgrace in death.
Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing.
It is wrong to be harsh with the New York critics, unless one admits in the same breath that it is a condition of their existence that they should write entertainingly about something which is rarely worth writing about at all.
It is serving God and others persistently with full heart and soul that turns testimony of truth into unbreakable spiritual strength.
I speak to the paper, as I speak to the first person I meet.
Man is alone everywhere. But the solitude of the Mexican, under the great stone night of the high plateau that is still inhabited by insatiable gods, is very different from that of the North American, who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens and moral precepts.
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