It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
George SantayanaRead
If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.
Interpretation
Choosing illusions over reality stems from a failure to confront true experiences or is simply a form of hypocrisy.
This quote by George Santayana suggests that individuals who cling to illusions do so because they have been let down by reality, leaving them feeling abandoned. Alternatively, it critiques those who dismiss the world without honest reflection, labeling their disdain as a cover for deeper insecurities.
In practice
In a debate about escapism in literature, this quote can illustrate the dangers of avoiding reality.
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 Middle Ages burned its heretics and the modern age threatens them with atom bombs.
I want to live in a world where my son will not be presumed guilty the moment he is born, where a toy in his hand isn't mistaken for anything other than a toy.
We are sure to be losers when we quarrel with ourselves; it is civil war.
Bread has been made (indifferent) from potatoes;_x000D_ _x000D_ And galvanism has set some corpses grinning,_x000D_ _x000D_ But has not answer'd like the apparatus_x000D_ _x000D_ Of the Humane Society's beginning,_x000D_ _x000D_ By which men are unsuffocated gratis:_x000D_ _x000D_ What wondrous new machines have late been spinning.
Pleasure is our first and kindred good. It is the starting point of every choice and of every aversion, and to it we always come back, inasmuch as we make feeling the rule by which to judge of every good thing.
One of our worst traits in journalism is that when we have a narrative in our minds, we often plug in anecdotes that confirm it. Thus we managed to portray President Gerald Ford, a first-rate athlete, as a klutz.
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