George Santayana Quotes

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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
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
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
Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.

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

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
Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs.

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

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
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
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
An operation that eventually kills may be technically successful, and the man may die cured; and so a description of religion thatshowed it to be madness might first show how real and warm it was, so that if it perished, at least it would perish understood.

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

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

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

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

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

George Santayana
The cosmos has its own way of doing things, not wholly rational nor ideally best, but patient, fatal, and fruitful. Great is this organism of mud and fire, terrible this vast, painful glorious experiment.

George Santayana
The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices.

George Santayana
To drink in the spirit of a place you should be not only alone but unhurried.

George Santayana
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.

George Santayana
The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger.

George Santayana
Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.

George Santayana
What seekest thou else In the dark backward and abysm of time?

George Santayana
Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

George Santayana