Religious unity can look like a carnival and religious liberty can look like a funeral.
Interpretation
Religious unity brings joy and celebration, while religious liberty can be serious and somber.
This quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton contrasts the vibrancy and joy of religious unity with the solemnity and seriousness that can accompany the notion of religious liberty. It suggests that while unity among different religions can lead to a festive and celebratory atmosphere, the idea of liberty might evoke a more grave consideration of the complexities and struggles involved in ensuring that freedom for all is respected and upheld.
In practice
In discussions about interfaith dialogues, this quote encapsulates the challenges and joys of bringing people together.
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.
Everything comes to us from others. To Be is to belong to someone.
Justice is the most important thing. In a plural society like Malaysia, you cannot have two laws - one law for the Muslim, one law for the non-Muslim.
With Othello, Shakespeare posed this problem of a black man in a white society in the role that he's playing. And Shakespeare gave Othello such dignity - he came not from - as he said - not from hate but from honor, from a sense of his own human dignity. And to me, to my mind, there could be no greater character played.
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh.
Seeing ourselves as others see us would probably confirm our worst suspicions about them.
No one really knows why they are alive until they know what they'd die for.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.