What a glorious garden of wonders the lights of Broadway would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the beauty and allure of Broadway through the perspective of someone who cannot read, suggesting that experiences can be enjoyed beyond understanding.
Gilbert K. Chesterton’s quote celebrates the vivid and enchanting qualities of Broadway, indicating that for someone unable to read, the spectacle of lights and performances might represent a world of wonder and imagination. It emphasizes that the essence of art and beauty can transcend literal comprehension, allowing for emotional and sensory experiences that are profound and impactful regardless of one’s ability to interpret text.
In practice
A presentation on the transformative power of art in society.
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.
When you start with a portrait and try to find pure form by abstracting more and more, you must end up with an egg.
We live in an era when established values are no longer valid, when prodigious discoveries are being made every year, when catastrophes of unbelievable proportions occur weekly. In ancient Greek the word “chaos” means “gaping void” or “yawning emptiness.” The most effective response to the chaos in our lives is the creation of new forms of literature, music, poetry, art and cinema.
You can't trust an artist that just makes good records.
Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.
Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.
The obsession with performance left no room for the development of the intuitive or spiritual impact of space and form other than the aesthetic of the machine itself.
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