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George Santayana Quotes - Page 13

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The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

George Santayana
Life, Believe, Long
George Santayana, Martin A. Coleman (2009). “The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings”, p.60, Indiana University Press

Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.

George Santayana
Life, Art, Peace
George Santayana, Marianne S. Wokeck, Martin A. Coleman, James Gouinlock (2015). “The Life of Reason Or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Art, Volume VII, Book Four”, p.107, MIT Press

You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete sceptic or idealist, but a realist at heart. So long as he is alive his sincere philosophy must fulfil the assumptions of his life and not destroy him.

George Santayana
Philosophy, Heart, Reality
Durant Drake, Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, James Bissett Pratt, Arthur Kenyon Rogers, George Santayana (1920). “Essays in critical realism: a co-operative study of the problem of knowledge”

Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.

George Santayana
Memories, Self, Bird
George Santayana (2011). “The Life of Reason: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense”, p.172, MIT Press

... so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected; it is recognised and obeyed.

George Santayana
Love, Heart, Surrender
"The Philosophy of Santayana: Selections from All the Works of George Santayana".

To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of its content.

George Santayana
Self, Useless, Occupation
George Santayana (2012). “The Sense of Beauty”, p.18, Courier Corporation

Order, for a liberal, means only peace; and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.

George Santayana
Mean, Order, Profound

Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom - picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode - may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair.

George Santayana
Winter, Civilization, Long
George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana: Character and opinion in the United States. The genteel tradition at bay. Dewey's naturalistic metaphysics. Philosophical heresy”

Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of them that has grown into a jealous passion.

George Santayana
Appreciation, Art, Passion

In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.

George Santayana
Philosophical, Mind, Unexpected

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.

George Santayana
Real, History, Theatre
George Santayana, Martin A. Coleman (2009). “The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings”, p.84, Indiana University Press

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

George Santayana
Football, Art, Kindness
George Santayana (1968). “Santayana on America: Essays, Notes, and Letters on American Life, Literature, and Philosophy”

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana
Change, Wisdom, Memories
The Life of Reason vol. 1, ch. 12 (1905)

O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies; To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art.

George Santayana
Wise, Art, Believe
George Santayana (1979). “The complete poems of George Santayana: a critical edition”, Associated Univ Pr

Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.

George Santayana
Memories, Past, Echoes
George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.375, 谷月社

Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

George Santayana
Mean, Recognition, Nasty
George Santayana (2011). “The Life of Reason: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense”, p.48, MIT Press

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.

George Santayana
Thinking, Firsts, Surrender
Scepticism and Animal Faith ch. 9 (1923)

It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.

George Santayana
Honor, Atheism, Deities
George Santayana (1934). “Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana”, p.54, Рипол Классик

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that 'a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.' At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.

George Santayana
God, Philosophy, Men
George Santayana (1954). “The Life of Reason ; Or, The Phases of Human Progress. One-volume Ed”

Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.

George Santayana
Religion, Fairy Tale, Tales
George Santayana, Martin A. Coleman (2009). “The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings”, p.8, Indiana University Press

Fear first created the gods.

George Santayana
Religion, Atheism, Firsts
George Santayana (1932). “The Life of Reason”, p.1222, Library of Alexandria

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
Order, Space, Wonderful
George Santayana, Marianne S. Wokeck, Martin A. Coleman, James Gouinlock (2014). “The Life of Reason Or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Religion, Volume VII, Book Three”, p.114, MIT Press

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

George Santayana
Love, Men, Giving
George Santayana (1934). “Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana”, p.99, Рипол Классик

Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.

George Santayana
Philosophy, Philosophical, Expression
George Santayana (1998). “The Genteel Tradition: Nine Essays”, p.116, U of Nebraska Press

Logic, like language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of symbolizing and harnessing in expression the existing diversities of things; and whilst some languages, given a man's constitution and habits, may seem more beautiful and convenient to him than others, it is a foolish heat in a patriot to insist that only his native language is intelligible or right.

George Santayana
Beautiful, Mean, Men

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