It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Appreciating beauty and imagination surpasses mere scientific understanding.
This quote emphasizes the idea that feeling and experiencing beauty, as well as cultivating imagination and aesthetic taste, hold greater value than simply understanding the scientific or rational explanations behind those feelings. It suggests that the subjective experience of beauty can lead to a deeper, more profound connection to ideals and nature, which transcends the limitations of scientific analysis.
Themes
BeautyImaginationArtScienceNature
In practice
Example use cases
In an art class to inspire students about the importance of feeling art rather than just analyzing it.
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
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
All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
George SantayanaRead
Similar quotes
In a way, editing is not unlike the movies. The best books, just like the best movies, are a collaboration. They're only as good as the compromise made between the artists involved.
Viggo MortensenRead
I realised that I had always been writing things that other people wanted me to write and not what I really wanted to write, so I felt like I was losing my way.
Carlos Ruiz ZafonRead
The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness.
Yann Arthus-BertrandRead
If you believe in what you do and you really want to be in music, just stick at it. It's always a learning process. Enjoy it because I think making music is a privilege, really. In an ideal world, it should also always be fun. As much as possible, make it fun.
Kate BushRead
I think you just have to be yourself instead of catering your sound to a specific audience, make the music you want to make, and the audience will find you.
Lewis CapaldiRead
With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.
Joseph BrodskyRead