George Santayana Quotes

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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
Unless hours were cups of sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses, and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in flame-colour'd taffeta, I see no reason why thou shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time of the day.

George Santayana
A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.

George Santayana
Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.

George Santayana
In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.

George Santayana
Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.

George Santayana
.. until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.

George Santayana
We are not compelled in naturalism, or even in materialism, to ignore immaterial things; the point is that any immaterial things which are recognized shall be regarded as names, aspects, functions, or concomitant products of those physical things among which action goes on.

George Santayana
The essence of nowness runs like a fire along the fuse of time.

George Santayana
A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.

George Santayana