The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.
Interpretation
This quote contrasts the voices of rebellion with the call for contentment.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote emphasizes the balance between rebellion and acceptance in life. The 'rebels and prophets' symbolize the necessary force of discontent that ignites change and progress, akin to a trumpet that demands attention, while the 'saints and sages' represent the enduring wisdom of contentment that resonates steadily, much like the constant and calming sound of the sea. Together, these voices remind us that both discontent and contentment serve vital roles in human experience.
In practice
In a motivational speech addressing a group of students about the importance of both striving for change and appreciating what they have.
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.
Things are as they are. Looking out into it the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.
There's a notion I'd like to see buried: the ordinary person. Ridiculous. There is no ordinary person.
What you yourself hate, don't do to your neighbor. This is the whole law; the rest is commentary. Go and study.
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
In the morning a man walks with his whole body; in the evening, only with his legs.
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