It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
George SantayanaRead
As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Friendship is a recurring theme in life, as those who value it naturally attract new friends over time.
This quote by George Santayana suggests that just as widowers often remarry, individuals who actively nurture the habit of friendship will continuously find new companions. It highlights the importance of maintaining an open heart and engaging socially, indicating that friendships evolve and grow, similar to romantic relationships, and that a mindset oriented towards connection invites further relationships.
Themes
FriendshipRelationshipsConnectionSocialHabit
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about the importance of community, one might quote this to emphasize how friendships can help build connections.
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
Friendship is like love at its best; not blind but sympathetically all-seeing; a support which does not wait for understanding; an act of faith which does not need, but always has, reason.
Louis UntermeyerRead
Friendship, then, like the other natural loves, is unable to save itself. In reality, because it is spiritual and therefore faces a subtler enemy, it must, even more wholeheartedly than they, invoke the divine protection if it hopes to remain sweet. For consider how narrow its true path is. Is must not become what the people call a "mutual admiration society"; yet if it is not full of mutual admiration, of Appreciative love, it is not Friendship at all.
C. S. LewisRead
Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.
AristotleRead
And when you come back to Japan next summer, let's have that date or whatever you want to call it. We can go to the zoo or the botanical garden or the aquarium, and then we'll have the most politically correct and scrumptious omelets we can find.
Haruki MurakamiRead
But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine.
Thomas JeffersonRead
We are sometimes made aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been times when our friends' thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven unnoticed; when they treated us not as what we were, but as what we aspired to be.
Henry David ThoreauRead