When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the idea that true appreciation for something encompasses both its clear qualities and its mysterious, less tangible aspects.
Gilbert K. Chesterton suggests that when we truly worship or admire something, our affection is not limited to what is easily understood or visible; instead, we also embrace its complexities and the elements that remain unknown. This duality between clarity and obscurity emphasizes the depth of our appreciation and the joy found in the mysteries of existence, which can enhance our emotional connection to the object of our reverence.
In practice
In a speech about art, one might use this quote to highlight how the unseen elements contribute to its beauty.
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.
The bells they sound on Bredon, And still the steeples hum. "Come all to church, good people"- Oh, noisy bells, be dumb; I hear you, I will come.
The love of liberty that is not a real principle of dutiful behavior to authority is as hypocritical as the religion that is not productive of a good life.
How is it possible to expect that mankind will take advice when they will not so much as take warning.
Time is the brush of God, as he paints his masterpiece on the heart of humanity.
They are all beasts of burden in a sense, ' Thoreau once remarked of animals, 'made to carry some portion of our thoughts.' Animals are the old language of the imagination; one of the ten thousand tragedies of their disappearance would be a silencing of this speech.
War is like love, it always finds a way.
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