Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.

What has always attracted me in life is poetry. Any genre can have poetry. For me, poetry contains truth.

Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.

I've always loved the poetry in 'Pale Fire.' I think it's wonderful.

For me, poetry is always a search for order.

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

Poetry is life distilled.

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.

I'm very attracted to poetry for all the reasons someone likes poetry. The notion of compression seems to fit my personality.

A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing, beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away.

I've tried to educate myself in the world and what's beautiful and what has meaning and is lasting. Then I just follow my intuition and see how it fits.

To this generation I would say: Memorize some bit of verse of truth or beauty.

For me, the poetry in a work is that which makes visible the invisible.

Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.

Poetry contains almost all you need to know about life.

Wisdom married to immortal verse.

You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure.

All of life in its complexity and beauty is forever minted in the gold of words.

Sometimes poetry--words--give us a small, lovely look at ourselves. And sometimes that is enough.

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful-while his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides being ugly.

Over all life broods Poesy, like the calm blue sky with its motherly, rebuking face. She is the great reformer, and where the love of her is strong and healthy, wickedness and wrong cannot long prevail.

An aged Burgundy runs with a beardless Port. I cherish the fancy that Port speaks sentences of wisdom, Burgundy sings the inspired Ode.