A Quote by George Santayana

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.

George Santayana

Quote Topics

Familiar Humor Keeps Mind Nimble Often Possible Prejudice Turning Unfamiliar Wisdom

Quote Author

George Santayana
Spanish - Novelist
December 16, 1863 - September 26, 1952

I have a rule: before I can throw anything out, I have to write down five possible uses for it. This stretches my mind and keeps it nimble - just like stretching exercises do for my body.

Anna Olson

Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through past prejudice, his duty becomes part of his nature.

Edmund Burke

I think literature can make familiar the unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar is very much about the dispossessed, and so the value of literature seems to me to go into the stories that not everybody wants to tell.

Colum McCann

What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose. And yet this unfamiliar source once struck man as strange and caused him to think and to wonder.

Martin Heidegger

The world should have stopped, but it didn't. The world kept on going. How can the world just keep on going? An earthquake in India kills a thousand people, and the world keeps on going. A famine in China kills a million people, and the world keeps on going. The twin towers of the World Trade Center buckle and fall, and the world, the world keeps on going.

Alison McGhee

Man's destructive hand spares nothing that lives; he kills to feed himself, he kills to clothe himself, he kills to adorn himself, he kills to attack, he kills to defend himself, he kills to instruct himself, he kills to amuse himself, he kills for the sake of killing.

Joseph de Maistre

To a person in love, the value of the individual is intuitively known. Love needs no logic for its mission. It roots in a bare wisdom that exists in senses more than mind, a wisdom that, in primitive form, evolved the mind which so often overlooks it.

Charles Lindbergh

There is no easy or difficult; only familiar and unfamiliar.

Kenny Werner

Semiotics is really interested in the questions like, what keeps you watching something, what keeps you - you know, what keeps you listening to a story on the radio? Like, what keeps you turning the pages in a book? What's the pleasure of it that's moving you forward, that's pulling you in and grabbing you and pulling you forward?

Ira Glass

The mind that doggedly insists on prejudice often has not intelligence enough to change.

Pearl S. Buck

I find you can often find humor just by turning something upside-down. Like a... small child.

Emo Philips

I disliked the unfamiliar happiness more than the familiar sadness

Tablo

We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble.

Emily Dickinson

The mind, conditioned as it is by the past, always seeks to re-create what it knows and is familiar with. Even if it is painful, at least it is familiar. The mind always adheres to the known. The unknown is dangerous because it has no control over it. That's why the mind dislikes and ignores the present moment.