George Santayana - Live Quotes

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Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.

George Santayana
They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life.

George Santayana
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

George Santayana
The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.

George Santayana
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
The mystic can live happily in the droning consciousness of his own heart-beats and those of the universe.

George Santayana
The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.

George Santayana
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

George Santayana
Even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not; and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.

George Santayana
Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.

George Santayana
There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.

George Santayana
Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.

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

George Santayana