Memorable Quotes and quotations from George SantayanaGeorge Santayana US (Spanish-born) philosopher (1863 - 1952)George Santayana - - America is a young country with an old mentality. George Santayana - Little Essays (1920) "Ideal Immortality" - The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it. George Santayana - - Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better. George Santayana - - There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. George Santayana - Dialogues in Limbo (1925) ch. 3 - The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool. George Santayana - - Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana - - Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated. George Santayana - - Music is essentially useless, as life is. George Santayana - Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 8 - Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject. George Santayana - - Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana - - The wisest mind has something yet to learn. George Santayana - The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905 - Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana - The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905 - 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 - Winds of Doctrine (1913) ch. 4 - Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it. George Santayana - The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905 - Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana - - The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation. George Santayana - Soliloquies in England, 1922, "War Shrines" - There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. George Santayana - - Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope. George Santayana - - A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. 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 - - Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better. George Santayana - Life of Reason (1905) vol. 1, Introduction - Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim. George Santayana - Vol. 53 / No. 18 MMWR page 391 - The wisest mind has something yet to learn. George Santayana - - Sanity is a madness put to good use. George Santayana - - It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas. George Santayana - Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 4 - Music is essentially useless, as life is. George Santayana - - Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment. George Santayana - Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 3 - An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world. 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 - - Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily. George Santayana - - The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns. George Santayana - - Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, not condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion. George Santayana - - The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise. George Santayana - - Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality. George Santayana - - Society is like the air; necessary to breathe, but insufficient to live on. George Santayana - - America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences. 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 - - The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about. George Santayana - Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 4 - Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions. George Santayana - - Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana - - That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions. George Santayana - Life of Reason (1905) vol. 1, ch. 10 - Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment. George Santayana - - Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him. George Santayana - - A child only educated at school is an uneducated child. George Santayana - - Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim. George Santayana - - Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel. George Santayana - Winds of Doctrine (1913) ch. 2 - For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned. George Santayana - - Sanity is a madness put to good use. George Santayana - - There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval George Santayana - "The German Mind: A Philosophical Diagnosis" - 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 - - Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said. 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 enabline it to make its peace with its destiny. |
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