What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.
Interpretation
Childhood is a time of awe and amazement, where the ordinary becomes extraordinary.
Gilbert K. Chesterton highlights the intrinsic magic of childhood, suggesting that during this time, everything perceived holds a sense of wonder. He distinguishes between a world that contains miracles and a world where the very nature of existence is miraculous, emphasizing the unique perspective that children have towards life.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a speech on the importance of nurturing creativity in children.
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.
Genius is nothing but a greater aptitude for patience.
Maybe the fear is that we are less than we think we are, when the actuality of it is that we are much much more.
If one oversteps the bounds of moderation, the greatest pleasures cease to please.
It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are the more gentle and quiet we become towards the defects of others.
For it falls out That what we have we prize not to the worth Whiles we enjoy it, but being lacked and lost, Why, then we rack the value, then we find The virtue that possession would not show us While it was ours.
There are but two ways of paying debt: Increase of industry in raising income, increase of thrift in laying out.
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