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George Santayana
85 quotes
“On fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[Everything] ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The highest form of vanity is love of fame.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble, it must remain rare, if common, it must become mean.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In proportion as a man's interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates and expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach the same impersonal level of ideas.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To know how just a cause we have for grieving is already a consolation.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a truth, however unwelcome to the flesh, or discover an actual force, however unfavourable to given interests.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind...They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Bible is literature, not dogma.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To covet truth is a very distinguished passion.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right. ** p. 49”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In Walt Whitman democracy is carried into psychology and morals. The various sights, moods, and emotions are given each one vote; they are declared to be all free and equal, and the innumerable commonplace moments of life are suffered to speak like the others. Those moments formerly reputed great are not excluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their companions—plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its Christianity, in practice, must be largely converted to paganism.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Persons who feel themselves to be exiles in this world—and what noble mind, from Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?—are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No doubt the spirit or energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole world is doing things.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together.”
George Santayana (1863–1952) said by 1952 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source