Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?
Interpretation
This quote suggests that fear may disguise ignorance, challenging the idea of who is truly enlightened.
In this quote, Chesterton presents a thought-provoking perspective on fear and ignorance. He suggests that those who are unafraid of the unknown—symbolized by 'devils in the dark'—might be perceived as foolish by others. Conversely, it raises the possibility that those who live in constant fear of the uncertain may be the true 'idiots', as their fears can blind them to knowledge and understanding. It encourages introspection regarding what fear means and how it influences our perceptions of reality.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about confronting fears.
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 more you know yourself, the more clarity there is. Self-knowledge has no end - you don't come to an achievement, you don't come to a conclusion. It is an endless river.
A child does not try to know the mother, it simply has faith in her. In the same way, having faith in the Divine is the source of the greatest strength.
I did not develop my ear. I discovered I had an ear, and it was an accident.
He who can reach a child's heart can reach the worlds heart.
Every human brain is both a broadcasting and receiving station for the vibration of thought.
Stress is a function not of events, but of our view of those events.
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