Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that the ordinary and mundane can hold beauty and wonder if we open our eyes to see it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton highlights the idea that poetry and amazement are not reserved for the extraordinary or monstrous. Instead, he argues that the beauty of life lies in recognizing the extraordinary aspects of everyday experiences and the 'normal' human condition. This perspective reveals that richness exists in the ordinary, inviting us to appreciate the simple moments that often go unnoticed.
In practice
In a motivational speech about finding beauty in daily life.
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.
Let us remember that a traitor may betray himself and do good that he does not intend. It can be so, sometimes.
The bigger a state becomes the more liberty diminishes.
It is better to die of hunger having lived without grief and fear, than to live with a troubled spirit, amid abundance
I meditate for the last time on this mountain that is bare, though others all around are white with snow. Like the bare peak of the koan, this one is not different from myself. I know this mountain because I am this mountain, I can feel it breathing at this moment, as its grass tops stray against the snows. If the snow leopard should leap from the rock above and manifest itself before me - S-A-A-O! - then in that moment of pure fright, out of my wits, I might truly perceive it, and be free.
I've said this over and over, but I'll say it a million more times - I'm concerned more about the death of a bee than I am about terrorism. Because we're losing hives and bees by the millions because of such strong pesticides.
I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing.
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