There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of mankind.
Interpretation
Chesterton suggests we can handle nonsense by either embracing it in its appropriate context or misplacing it in serious discussions.
In this quote, Gilbert K. Chesterton highlights the dual ways in which people can approach nonsense in the world: either by accepting it in contexts where it is positive, like nursery rhymes, or by mistakenly applying it to serious matters such as education and psychology. This distinction underscores the importance of context in evaluating ideas and critiques, encouraging a more thoughtful examination of what is considered 'nonsense' versus what is valid.
In practice
During a lecture, one might reference this quote to discuss the role of humor in education.
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.
In the real world, the smartest people are people who make mistakes and learn. In school, the smartest people don't make mistakes.
A book is a garden, a party, a company by the way.
Since belief determines behavior, doesn't it make sense that we should be teaching ethical, moral values in every home and in every school in America?
A lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics, and divinity that ever were written.
You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
We have to move back to the idea that education isn't about teaching people to bow to rigid rules. That's not what democracy is about.
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