George Santayana Quotes

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Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.

George Santayana
Though the heart wear the garment of its sorrow And be not happy like a naked star, Yet from the thought of peace some peace we borrow, Some rapture from the rapture felt afar.

George Santayana
To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.

George Santayana
At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself, or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat.

George Santayana
Music is essentially useless, as life is; but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana
A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world; and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.

George Santayana
Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs.

George Santayana
You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete sceptic or idealist, but a realist at heart. So long as he is alive his sincere philosophy must fulfil the assumptions of his life and not destroy him.

George Santayana
Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.

George Santayana
Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.

George Santayana
There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar and anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce stupidity. Such a headless people has the mind of a worm and the claws of a dragon.

George Santayana
Theory - when we use the word for a schema of things' relations and not for contemplation of them in their detail and fulness - is an expedient to cover ignorance and remedy confusion.

George Santayana
Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.

George Santayana
An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.

George Santayana
There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.

George Santayana
We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.

George Santayana
Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.

George Santayana
One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.

George Santayana
The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.

George Santayana
What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like?

George Santayana
God then becomes a poetic symbol for the material tenderness and the paternal strictness of this wonderful world; the ways of God become the subject-matter of physics.

George Santayana
Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.

George Santayana
My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

George Santayana
And the animate world must needs concern the physicist, since it is the crown of nature, the focus where matter concentrates its fires and best shows what it is capable of doing.

George Santayana
Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.

George Santayana
It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.

George Santayana
The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.

George Santayana
Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

George Santayana
Science is a half-way house between private sensation and universal vision.

George Santayana
It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.

George Santayana