QUOTES by George Santayana
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“Wisdom lies in voluntary finitude and a timely change of heart: until maturity, multiplying the inclusions, up to the limit of natural faculty and moral harmony; afterwards, gladly relinquishing zone after zone of vegetation, and letting the snow-peak of integrity rise to what height it may.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“A man is morally free when...he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity”
Quote by -George Santayana
“Those were the two prerequisites, in my conception, to perfect friendship: capacity to worship and capacity to laugh. Modern life is not made for friendship: common interests are not strong enough, private interests too absorbing. In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“We laughed at the same things, and we liked the same things. What more is needed for agreeable society?”
Quote by -George Santayana
“The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about. Athletics don’t make anybody long-lived or useful.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“All conditions are bearable, all dignities trumpery, and wisdom simply the gift of making the best of whatever is thrust upon us.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“What is the part of wisdom? To dream with one eye open; to be detatched from the world without being hostile to it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings, without forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“A habitual indulgence in the inarticulate is a sure sign of the philosopher who has not learned to think, the poet who has not learned to write, the painter who has not learned to paint, and the impression that has not learned to express itself--all of which are compatible with an immensity of genius in the inexpressible soul.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible”
Quote by -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.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.”
Quote by -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.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“Scepticism 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.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there. . . . History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten”
Quote by -George Santayana
“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”
Quote by -George Santayana
“love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.”
Quote by -George Santayana