George Santayana - The Life of Reason

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

George Santayana
The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.

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

George Santayana
The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.

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 Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.

George Santayana
It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.

George Santayana
Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.

George Santayana
Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.

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
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
We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.

George Santayana
Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.

George Santayana
Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

George Santayana
Science is a half-way house between private sensation and universal vision.

George Santayana