Poetry Quote by G.K. Chesterton — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.”

“If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.”

“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

“vers libre," (free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture.”

“The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.”

“But you hate poetry!”

“The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives”

“God moves in mysterious ways”

“It is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive that like the spirit of a plant or an animal it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing. The thought and the form are equal in the order of time, but in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form.”

“I am filled time and again”

“Poetry is the language of a state of crisis.”