George Santayana Quotes

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Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair.

George Santayana
My soul hates the fool whose only passion is to live by rule.

George Santayana
To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.

George Santayana
Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.

George Santayana
It is one thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagination.

George Santayana
Logic, like language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of symbolizing and harnessing in expression the existing diversities of things; and whilst some languages, given a man's constitution and habits, may seem more beautiful and convenient to him than others, it is a foolish heat in a patriot to insist that only his native language is intelligible or right.

George Santayana
Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.

George Santayana
Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age

George Santayana
If all the arts aspire to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

George Santayana
The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.

George Santayana
An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.

George Santayana
In this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express; the choice lies between a mask and a figleaf.

George Santayana
There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor's chair.

George Santayana
To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.

George Santayana
The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.

George Santayana
If clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary matters.

George Santayana
The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.

George Santayana
Better not be a hero than work oneself up into heroism by shouting lies.

George Santayana
The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken with to themselves.

George Santayana
When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.

George Santayana
It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility

George Santayana
The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.

George Santayana
It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.

George Santayana
What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word--the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.

George Santayana
In any close society it is more urgent to restrain others than to be free oneself. Hence the tendency for the central authority to absorb and supersede such as are local or delegated.

George Santayana
Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.

George Santayana
Time irrevocably flies, towards changeless eternity.

George Santayana
Order, for a liberal, means only peace; and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.

George Santayana
In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else

George Santayana
Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.

George Santayana