...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.
Interpretation
Children find humor in simple and natural things rather than in complex or exaggerated ideas.
This quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton emphasizes that children possess an innate sense of humor and wonder in the ordinary aspects of life. The mention of a luminous nose symbolizes over-the-top attempts to elicit laughter, suggesting instead that the mere existence of something as basic as a nose can be amusing to a child, highlighting the beauty of simplicity and the unfiltered perspective of youth.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of humor in childhood development.
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.
You can become famous but you can't become unfamous. You can become infamous but not unfamous.
Praise undeserved, is satire in disguise.
Dogs need to sniff the ground; it's how they keep abreast of current events. The ground is a giant dog newspaper, containing all kinds of late-breaking dog news items, which, if they are especially urgent, are often continued in the next yard.
Rugby is a good occasion for keeping thirty bullies far from the center of the city.
Names are not always what they seem. The common Welsh name Bzjxxllwcp is pronounced Jackson.
Some minds are like soup in a poor restaurant—better left unstirred.
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