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George Santayana Quotes
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Famous George Santayana Quotations
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George Santayana (December 16, 1863, Madrid - September 26, 1952, Rome), was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist
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- ... everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence. George Santayana »
- A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world. George Santayana »
- A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present. George Santayana »
- A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted. George Santayana »
- Advertising is the modern substitute for argument its function is to make the worse appear the better. George Santayana »
- All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible. George Santayana »
- Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it. George Santayana »
- America is a young country with an old mentality. George Santayana »
- An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world. George Santayana »
- An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity. George Santayana »
- Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel. George Santayana »
- Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him. George Santayana »
- Culture is on the horns of this dilemma if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean. George Santayana »
- Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny. George Santayana »
- Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim. George Santayana »
- For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned. George Santayana »
- Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions their reasons are always different. George Santayana »
- Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is. George Santayana »
- Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another people are friends in spots. George Santayana »
- Friendship is constant in all other things Save in the office and affairs of love. George Santayana »
- Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves. George Santayana »
- Happiness is the only sanction of life where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment. George Santayana »
- I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads. 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 »
- Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it. George Santayana »
- It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to. George Santayana »
- Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness. George Santayana »
- Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament. George Santayana »
- Love is only half the illusion the lover, but not his love, is deceived. George Santayana »
- Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion. George Santayana »
- Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions. George Santayana »
- Music is essentially useless, as life is. George Santayana »
- Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited. George Santayana »
- Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body. George Santayana »
- Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject. George Santayana »
- One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human. George Santayana »
- Our character...is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be. George Santayana »
- Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand. George Santayana »
- Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Thse who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana »
- Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience. George Santayana »
- Sanity is a madness put to good use. George Santayana »
- Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated. George Santayana »
- Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness. George Santayana »
- Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily. George Santayana »
- The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation. George Santayana »
- The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular. George Santayana »
- The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend. George Santayana »
- The Soul is the voice of the body's interests. George Santayana »
- The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it. George Santayana »
- The wisest mind has something yet to learn. 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 »
- There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. George Santayana »
- There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity. George Santayana »
- Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana »
- Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality. George Santayana »
- To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language. George Santayana »
- To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career. George Santayana »
- To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. George Santayana »
- To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood. George Santayana »
- When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out. George Santayana »
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