George Santayana - Man Quotes

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Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

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
Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home.

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 constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.

George Santayana
Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.

George Santayana
Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.

George Santayana
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

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

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
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.

George Santayana
Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.

George Santayana
What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

George Santayana
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.

George Santayana
The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

George Santayana
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.

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
Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.

George Santayana
There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he.

George Santayana
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

George Santayana
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.

George Santayana
Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.

George Santayana
The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.

George Santayana
All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death.

George Santayana
Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.

George Santayana
A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interests in the present.

George Santayana
If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.

George Santayana
As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends.

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