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.
As the waves of perfume, heliotrope, rose, _x000D_ _x000D_ Float in the garden when no wind blows, _x000D_ _x000D_ Come to us, go from us, whence no one knows; _x000D_ _x000D_ So the old tunes float in my mind, _x000D_ _x000D_ And go from me leaving no trace behind, _x000D_ _x000D_ Like fragrance borne on the hush of the wind.
All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
I've always wanted to create drama in my pictures, which is why I paint people. It's people who have brought drama to pictures from the beginning. The simplest human gestures tell stories.
You don't go out and play Beethoven's 'Opus 111' without having rethought about it every time you play.
The fact is that it takes more than ingredients and technique to cook a good meal. A good cook puts something of himself into the preparation - he cooks with enjoyment, anticipation, spontaneity, and he is willing to experiment.
I had never before thought of how awful the relationship must be between the musician and his instrument. He has to fill it, this instrument, with the breath of life, his own. He has to make it do what he wants it to do. And a piano is just a piano. It's made out of so much wood and wires and little hammers and big ones, and ivory. While there's only so much you can do with it, the only way to find this out is to try; to try and make it do everything.
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