It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
George SantayanaRead
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
Interpretation
Faith guides the heart towards understanding deeper truths about existence.
In this quote, George Santayana suggests that faith acts as a gentle illumination, helping individuals navigate the complexities of life and leading them to contemplate higher, divine thoughts. It highlights the significance of faith in understanding profound truths and connecting with something greater than oneself.
In practice
In a motivational speech about following one's dreams when doubt arises.
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.
The Unitarian Church has done more than any other church to substitute character for creed, and to say that a man should be judged by his spirit; by the climate of his heart; by the autumn of his generosity; by the spring of his hope; that he should be judged by what he does; by the influence that he exerts, rather than by the mythology he may believe.
We are born of light. The seasons are felt through light. We only know the world as it is evoked by light.
On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.
Nobody understood The Reoccurring Dream, but after September 11, when we were coerced to do a national duty and go out and shop, surely people could begin to see what I was getting at.
Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths. By finding your own dream and following it through, it will lead you to the myth-world in which you live. But just as in dream, the subject and object, though they seem to be separate, are really the same.
It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.
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