It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
George SantayanaRead
A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.
Interpretation
Gratitude can enhance our sense of happiness both externally and internally.
This quote by George Santayana suggests that a grateful environment plays a crucial role in our happiness. It posits that external circumstances, filled with appreciation and gratitude, can uplift our spirits, while internal feelings of hope and living rightly can also enhance our well-being. Thus, both external and internal gratitude are vital for achieving true happiness.
In practice
Speaking at a wellness seminar about the importance of gratitude in daily life.
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.
Children are happy because they don't have a file in their minds called "All the Things That Could Go Wrong.
I have everything I need, so there are no blanks left unfilled.
There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
When you are not happy with your life, always think that someone is happy simply because you exist
The chances are that you have already come to believe that happiness is unattainable. But men have attained it. And they have attained it by realizing that happiness does not spring from the procuring of physical or mental pleasure, but from the development of reason and the adjustment of conduct to principles.
I've realized that being happy is a choice. You never want to rub anybody the wrong way or not be fun to be around, but you have to be happy. When I get logical and I don't trust my instincts - Thats when I get in trouble.
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