Santayana, George
quotes - related books on Amazon ->
Santayana, George
The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
Santayana, George
Commitment
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.
Santayana, George
Cities and City Life
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.
Santayana, George
Death and Dying
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
Santayana, George
Colleges and Universities
Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
Santayana, George
Conscience
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
Santayana, George
Emotions
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
Santayana, George
Dignity
Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.
Santayana, George
Dignity
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
Santayana, George
Emotions
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
Santayana, George
Chaos
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
Santayana, George
Disease
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.
Santayana, George
Family
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
Santayana, George
Fame
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
Santayana, George
Fashion
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
Santayana, George
History and Historians
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
Santayana, George
Impossibility
The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
Santayana, George
Focus
A man s feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
Santayana, George
Patriotism
There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
Santayana, George
Food and Eating
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
Santayana, George
Fanatics and Fanaticism
A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
Santayana, George
Freedom
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
Santayana, George
Happiness
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experience.
Santayana, George
Happiness
Habit is stronger than reason.
Santayana, George
Habit
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
Santayana, George
Friends and Friendship
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
Santayana, George
Fear
The family is one of nature s masterpieces.
Santayana, George
Family
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
Santayana, George
Institutions
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
Santayana, George
Life and Living
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.
Santayana, George
Inferiority
If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
Santayana, George
Pain
The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.
Santayana, George
Life and Living
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
Santayana, George
Intolerance
Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited.
Santayana, George
Nonsense
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.
Santayana, George
Memory
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
Santayana, George
Love
I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
Santayana, George
Liberty
Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.
Santayana, George
Life, Lust For
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
Santayana, George
Knowledge
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
Santayana, George
Saints
There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
Santayana, George
Sympathy
Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
Santayana, George
Sanity
Music is essentially useless, as life is.
Santayana, George
Music
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
Santayana, George
Prayer
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Santayana, George
Past
Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
Santayana, George
Potential
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
Santayana, George
Swearing
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
Santayana, George
Possessions
The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.
Santayana, George
Tragedies
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
Santayana, George
Pride
Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
Santayana, George
Superstition
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
Santayana, George
Men and Women
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
Santayana, George
Parents and Parenting
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.
Santayana, George
Progress
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.
Santayana, George
Skepticism
To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
Santayana, George
Seasons
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.
Santayana, George
Theory
The spirit s foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
Santayana, George
Spirit and Spirituality
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
Santayana, George
Skepticism
The empiricist... thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
Santayana, George
Skepticism
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
Santayana, George
Unhappiness
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
Santayana, George
Proverbs
The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.
Santayana, George
Space
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
Santayana, George
Society
The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
Santayana, George
Theater
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
Santayana, George
Words
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
Santayana, George
Sacrifice
The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.
Santayana, George
Reason
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
Santayana, George
Thoughts and Thinking
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
Santayana, George
Science and Scientists
By nature s kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man s power to answer do not occur to him at all.
Santayana, George
Questions
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
Santayana, George
Body
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
Santayana, George
Education
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.
Santayana, George
Aggression
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
Santayana, George
Arts and Artists
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
Santayana, George
Advantage
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
Santayana, George
America
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
Santayana, George
Character
Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
Santayana, George
Fun
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
Santayana, George
Advertising
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
Santayana, George
Beauty
America is a young country with an old mentality.
Santayana, George
America
The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
Santayana, George
Conversation
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
Santayana, George
Wisdom
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
Santayana, George
Worth
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
Santayana, George
War
The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
Santayana, George
Wives