It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
George SantayanaRead
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Fashion often leads to unnecessary changes and trends that serve little purpose.
In this quote, George Santayana critiques the nature of fashion, suggesting that it is marked by a lack of reason and true benefit. He implies that while fashion drives innovation, it can often lead to trends that are shallow and merely serve to imitate without providing any real value or substance. This highlights the often superficial and transient nature of fashion in society.
Themes
FashionInnovationImitationArtCritique
In practice
Example use cases
During a fashion lecture, one could use this quote to discuss the implications of trends.
More from George Santayana
All quotes βThe 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
There rise her timeless capitals of empires daily born, whose plinths are laid at midnight and whose streets are packed at morn; and here come tired youths and maids that feign to love or sin in tones like rusty razor blades to tunes like smitten tin.
Rudyard KiplingRead
I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
Audre LordeRead
There's that old cliche that art is never finished, only abandoned. That's the nice thing about comics. It forces you to abandon it long before maybe you're ready to let it go.
Jonathan HickmanRead
That's the beauty of the animation process: It takes so long, you have so many chances to improve it.
Phil LordRead
There's blood, a taste I remember. It tastes of orange popsicles, penny gumballs, red licorice, gnawed hair, dirty ice.
Margaret AtwoodRead