It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
George SantayanaRead
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
Interpretation
Emotion is often linked to nothing tangible, yet it holds great significance in our lives.
George Santayana's quote suggests that emotions, while they may seem to arise from nothing concrete, play a vital role in our human experience. He emphasizes that much of what we feel may not have clear reasons or significance, yet these emotions are essential to understanding ourselves and navigating life.
In practice
During a discussion on mental health, you could use this quote to illustrate the complex nature of emotions.
It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.
Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.
To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
Only man is permitted to live without rhythm in order that he can become free. However, he must of his own accord bring rhythm again into the chaos.
But he found that a traveller's life is one that includes much pain amidst its enjoyments. His feelings are for ever on the stretch; and when he begins to sink into repose, he finds himself obliged to quit that on which he rests in pleasure for something new, which again engages his attention, and which also he forsakes for other novelties.
There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.
At first it seems obvious, but the more you think about it the stranger the deductions from this axiom seem to become; in the end you cease to understand what is meant by it.
It's a difficult competition against silence, because silence is a perfect language, the only language which says with no words.
They looked as if nothing had ever touched them--all well-mothered, protected, with a soft sheen of contentment. None of them had ever been in jail, or worked hard with their hands, or even gotten a traffic ticket. Skimmed-milk jollies, the whole bunch.
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