It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
George SantayanaRead
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
Interpretation
Embracing new experiences enhances our understanding and mental agility.
George Santayana suggests that regularly shifting from familiar environments to unfamiliar ones fosters mental flexibility, challenges our biases, and encourages a sense of humor. This exploration enriches our perspectives and allows for personal growth by exposing us to diversity in thought and experience.
In practice
This quote is perfect for a workshop on personal development.
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.
An old man was asked what had robbed him of joy in his life. His reply was, "Things that never happened."
I would like to understand things better, but I don’t want to understand them perfectly.
Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results; bad thoughts and actions can never produce good results … We understand this law in the natural world, and work with it; but few understand it in the mental and moral world—although its operation there is just as simple and undeviating— and they, therefore, do not cooperate with it.
It wasn’t in books. It wasn’t in a church. What I needed to know was out there in the world.
Learn to be pleased with everything...because it could always be worse, but isn't!
Indeed, follow your star if you want to head north and it's the North Star. But if you want to head north and it's Mars, you had better follow somebody else's star.
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