Poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense.
Interpretation
Poetry creatively expresses ideas in a way that might seem nonsensical but is deeply insightful.
Isaac Newton's quote suggests that poetry, although it may appear to lack rational structure or logic, possesses a unique intelligence that can communicate profound truths and emotions. This 'ingenious nonsense' reflects the inherent beauty and complexity of human experience, highlighting poetry's ability to transcend ordinary understanding and engage the imagination.
In practice
In a speech about creativity, one might say, 'As Isaac Newton said, poetry is a kind of ingenious nonsense, reminding us that true expression sometimes defies logic.'
The best and safest way of philosophising seems to be, first to enquire diligently into the properties of things, and to establish those properties by experiences [experiments] and then to proceed slowly to hypotheses for the explanation of them. For hypotheses should be employed only in explaining the properties of things, but not assumed in determining them; unless so far as they may furnish experiments.
Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my greatest friend is truth.
His epitaph: Who, by vigor of mind almost divine, the motions and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, and the tides of the seas first demonstrated.
And from true lordship it follows that the true God is living, intelligent, and powerful; from the other perfections, that he is supreme, or supremely perfect. He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, he endures from eternity to eternity; and he is present from infinity to infinity; he rules all things, and he knows all things that happen or can happen.
My Design in this Book is not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by Reason and Experiments: In order to which, I shall premise the following Definitions and Axioms.
It is the weight, not numbers of experiments that is to be regarded.
Let’s be realistic about this, the guitar can be the single most blasphemous device on the face of the earth. That’s why I like it . . . The disgusting stink of a too-loud electric guitar: now that’s my idea of a good time.
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful.
I could paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing.
In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.
I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.
I was born Chinese, and I write in Chinese. I don't think there's any need to evade this... to a writer, as to a person, what matters is not his political label or his nationality, but whether he is a person and whether his work is worth looking at.
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