The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.
Interpretation
The pursuit of distinction can lead to a lack of authenticity and vulgarity.
In this quote, Chesterton suggests that those who seek recognition and distinction often embody a kind of vulgarity, as it reflects a superficial desire for attention rather than genuine merit or character. Essentially, the quest for approval can diminish one's individuality and depth, revealing how the pursuit of recognition can be inherently flawed.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the value of authenticity over social status.
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.
You cannot overestimate the unimportance of practically everything.
When you're not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you've sinned.
The purpose of prayer is emphatically not to bend God's will to ours, but rather to align our will to his.
It's a funny thing about cities: Some have brief, bright moments of cultural and political dominance, decades- or centuries-long spells when they seem the center of their particular nation, or region, or empire... only to later fall into obscurity and disrepair, never to regain their former glory.
Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.
Do not grieve over someone who changes all of the sudden. It might be that he has given up acting and returned to his true self.
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