It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
George SantayanaRead
Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Our understanding of the divine is shaped by our experiences of beauty and happiness in harmony with our surroundings.
George Santayana suggests that our conception of the divine life is rooted in our personal experiences of beauty and happiness. These moments of harmony between our inner nature and the external world help form our understanding of what is sacred or divine. Essentially, the divine is not an abstract concept, but something that is felt through our lived experience in a harmonious environment.
Themes
BeautyHappinessDivineHarmonyNatureExperience
In practice
Example use cases
Use this quote in a discussion about how art and nature influence spirituality.
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
This is the 21st-century paradox: Even as political democracy has become the intellectual default mode for much of the world, the private sector usually trumps the public one when it comes to accommodating consumer choice.
Chrystia FreelandRead
There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is.
Isaac Bashevis SingerRead
The right of nature... is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life.
Thomas HobbesRead
I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me.
BanksyRead
Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.
Isaiah BerlinRead
The practice of yoga induces a primary sense of measure and proportion. Reduced to our own body, our first instrument, we learn to play it, drawing from it maximum resonance and harmony.
Yehudi MenuhinRead