It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that there is a distinction between objective facts and the subjective interpretations humans have of those facts.
George Santayana articulates a philosophical perspective on the relationship between objective reality and human perception. By stating that there is a 'dualism' between facts and the ideas of those facts, he emphasizes that while facts exist independently of human thought, our understanding, beliefs, and interpretations of these facts are inherently subjective and can vary from person to person.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a philosophical discussion about the nature of reality, one could use this quote to illustrate the distinction between objective and subjective understanding.
More from George Santayana
All quotes βThe 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.
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I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.
All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.
Die happily and look forward to taking up a new and better form. Like the sun, only when you set in the west can you rise in the east.
Men speak of dreaming as if it were a phenomenon of night and sleep. They should know better. All results achieved by us are self-promised, and all self-promises are made in dreams awake. Dreaming is the relief of labor,the wine that sustains us in act. We learn to love labor, not for itself, but for the opportunity it furnishes for dreaming, which is the great under-monotone of real life, unheard, unnoticed, because of its constancy. Living is dreaming. Only in the graves are there no dreams.
The sin of fallen man is this: Man seeks the benefits of God while at the same time fleeing from God Himself.
The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.