It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
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.
Interpretation
People accept what they can handle and reject what they cannot understand.
This quote by George Santayana suggests that individuals have a natural tendency to embrace experiences and truths that they feel equipped to deal with, while they tend to dismiss or vilify those that fall outside their comprehension or readiness. It reflects on the limitations of human perception and the subjective nature of acceptance.
In practice
In a discussion on self-awareness, one might say this quote to illustrate how individuals can only grow from experiences they are ready to face.
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.
You, yesterday, did the usual things, just as any day, You don't know if it's worth remembering. You would prefer to remember, there lying in the half-darkness of the bedroom, not what has happened already but what is going to happen. In your half-darkness your eyes would prefer to look ahead, not behind, and they do not know how to foresee the past.
Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.
And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, 'Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?' and sometimes, 'Do bats eat cats?' for, you see, as she couldn't answer either question, it didn't much matter which way she put it.
My objection to organized religion is the premature conclusion to ultimate truth that it represents.
To us, it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg was wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have the with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.
It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break their eggs at the smaller end.
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