George Santayana - The Life of Reason

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History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

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

George Santayana
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

George Santayana
So in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being known how to touch it. That being is not selected but recognized and obeyed.

George Santayana
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.

George Santayana
Knowledge is the recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

George Santayana
In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality....The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.

George Santayana
A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.

George Santayana
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

George Santayana
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

George Santayana
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

George Santayana
[Everything] ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development.

George Santayana
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

George Santayana
Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.

George Santayana
Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.

George Santayana
Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.

George Santayana
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

George Santayana
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.

George Santayana
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

George Santayana
When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.

George Santayana
With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

George Santayana
Science, then is the alternative consideration of common experience; it is common knowledge extended and refined.

George Santayana
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

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
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
The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.

George Santayana
Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.

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
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
Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.

George Santayana