It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.
Interpretation
Humans should create meaningful and imaginative environments in their homes and surroundings.
Gilbert K. Chesterton emphasizes the importance of creating a personal space that resonates with one's imagination and significance. The quote suggests that it is the essential duty of individuals to not just occupy a physical space, but to transform it into a reflection of their inner world, thus enriching their lives and the lives of those around them.
In practice
In a speech about personal growth, you might say, 'As Chesterton reminds us, we must shape our homes to reflect our values and dreams.'
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.
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances.
The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth—can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its power to transform nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth.
Charity . . . is the opium of the privileged.
I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it's safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries.
When any system has for its goal the advancement of the system over the betterment of its individual members, such a system is embedded in slavery.
In so far as men are influenced by envy or any kind of hatred, one towards another, they are at variance, and are therefore to be feared in proportion, as they are more powerful than their fellows._x000D_ _x000D_ Yet minds are not conquered by force, but by love and high-mindedness.
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