It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
George SantayanaRead
The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The word 'is' connects concepts but may obscure their true differences, leading to both beauty and peril.
In this quote, George Santayana reflects on the simplicity and complexity inherent in the word 'is'. It serves as a connector that marries different concepts or identities, suggesting unity. However, the beauty of this connection is tempered by the reality that no two entities are truly identical, and this oversimplification can lead to misunderstandings and dangers in perception.
Themes
LanguageIdentityPerceptionPhilosophyConnection
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the power of language, you might quote Santayana to illustrate how words shape our understanding.
More from George Santayana
All quotes →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.
George SantayanaRead
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.
George SantayanaRead
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.
George SantayanaRead
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.
George SantayanaRead
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.
George SantayanaRead
Similar quotes
I believe that for permanent survival, man must balance science with other qualities of life, qualities of body and spirit as well as those of mind - qualities he cannot develop when he lets mechanics and luxury insulate him too greatly from the earth to which he was born.
Charles LindberghRead
Speak the truth do not become angered and give when asked, even be it a little. By these three conditions one goes to the presence of the gods.
Gautama BuddhaRead
He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog.
Rainer Maria RilkeRead
If I deny the authority of the State when it presents my tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard, this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects.
Henry David ThoreauRead
Memory does not make films, it makes photographs.
Milan KunderaRead
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
George OrwellRead