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George Santayana Quotes - Page 8

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Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.

Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.

George Santayana
Philosophy, Philosophical, Hobbies
George Santayana, Martin A. Coleman (2009). “The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings”, p.580, Indiana University Press

It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.

George Santayana
Wells, Pleasant, Can Do
George Santayana (2002). “The Works of George Santayana: The letters of George Santayana. 1921-1927. Vol. 5. Book 3”, MIT Press

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

George Santayana
Men, Simplicity, Simple Life
George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.204, 谷月社

Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.

George Santayana
Inattention, Contempt, Familiarity Breeds Contempt
George Santayana (2012). “The Sense of Beauty”, p.103, Courier Corporation

The unforgivable sin is the refusal to pardon.

George Santayana
Forgiveness, Unforgivable Sin, Refusal

There is no dunce like a mature dunce.

George Santayana
Stupidity, Mature, Dunces
George Santayana (2015). “Character and Opinion in the United States”, p.30, Sheba Blake Publishing

We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.

George Santayana
Vanity, Support, Forgiving
George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.84, 谷月社

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.

George Santayana
Drama, Ideas, Imagination
George Santayana, Marianne S. Wokeck, Martin A. Coleman, James Gouinlock (2013). “The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Society, Volume VII, Book Two”, p.89, MIT Press

Oaths are the fossils of piety.

George Santayana
Promise, Fossils, Swearing
George Santayana (1950). “Atoms of Thought: An Anthology of Thoughts”

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

George Santayana
Wise, Men, Talking

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

George Santayana
World, Moments, Contradiction
George Santayana (1936). “The Works of George Santayana”

Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs.

George Santayana
Affair, Seriousness, Humans
George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana”

Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

George Santayana
Wise, Opposites, Balance
George Santayana (1936). “The works of George Santayana”

To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.

George Santayana
Ideas, Events, Literature
George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.286, 谷月社

Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.

George Santayana
Design, Individuality, Hobbies

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.

George Santayana
Selfish, Men, Overcoming
"Little Essays Drawn from the Writings of George Santayana".

A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.

George Santayana
Character, Greatness, Men
George Santayana (2014). “Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion”, p.19, The Floating Press

Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.

George Santayana
Truth, Circumstances, Mortals
George Santayana (1968). “Santayana on America: Essays, Notes, and Letters on American Life, Literature, and Philosophy”

I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.

George Santayana
Happiness, Believe, Passion
George Santayana, William G. Holzberger (2001). “The Letters of George Santayana”, p.231, MIT Press

The scientific value of truth is not, however, ultimate or absolute. It rests partly on practical, partly on aesthetic interests. As our ideas are gradually brought into conformity with the facts by the painful process of selection,-for intuition runs equally into truth and into error, and can settle nothing if not controlled by experience,-we gain vastly in our command over our environment. This is the fundamental value of natural science

George Santayana
Running, Science, Errors
George Santayana (2004). “The Sense of Beauty”, p.22, Cosimo, Inc.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

George Santayana
Reflection, Age, Doe
George Santayana (2015). “Character and Opinion in the United States”, p.21, Sheba Blake Publishing

Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway

George Santayana
Intuition, Reason, Instinct
George Santayana, Marianne S. Wokeck, Martin A. Coleman, James Gouinlock (2013). “The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Society, Volume VII, Book Two”, p.17, MIT Press

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
Passion, Knowing, Religion
George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.159, 谷月社

In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.

George Santayana
Passion, Recognition, Contemplation
George Santayana (2012). “The Sense of Beauty”, p.24, Courier Corporation

Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.

George Santayana
Men, Long, Speech
George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana”

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