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George Santayana Quotes - Page 9

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The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.

The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.

George Santayana
Long, May, Honey
George Santayana, Martin A. Coleman (2009). “The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings”, p.129, Indiana University Press

Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.

George Santayana
Beauty, Beautiful, Taste
George Santayana (1934). “Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana”, p.40, Рипол Классик

Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.

George Santayana
Peace, Philosophy, Harmony
George Santayana (1945). “The Middle Span”

A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.

George Santayana
Ideas, Growth, Mind
George Santayana, Marianne S. Wokeck, Martin A. Coleman, James Gouinlock (2011). “The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense, Volume VII, Book One”, p.103, MIT Press

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

George Santayana
Birthday, Passion, Pride
George Santayana (1934). “Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana”, p.22, Рипол Классик

There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor's chair.

George Santayana
Philosophy, Church, Bed
George Santayana (1967). “Animal Faith and Spiritual Life”, Irvington Pub

Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.

George Santayana
Echoes, Vision, Arms
George Santayana (1970). “Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe”, p.131, Library of Alexandria

The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.

George Santayana
Clouds, Battle, Lightning
George Santayana, Martin A. Coleman (2009). “The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings”, p.150, Indiana University Press

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

George Santayana
God, Atheism, Firsts
George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.126, 谷月社

Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.

George Santayana
Enemy, Weapons, Argument
George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana: Scepticism and animal faith. Some meanings of the word "is". Literal and symbolic knowledge. The unknowable”

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.

George Santayana
Philosophy, Ideas, Detectives
George Santayana (1934). “Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana”, p.201, Рипол Классик

Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.

George Santayana
Men, Importance

Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.

George Santayana
Adventure, Age, Spirit
George Santayana (1953). “Persons and Places: My host the world”

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

George Santayana
Book, Hands, Interesting
George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana”

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

George Santayana
Saint, Saints And Sinners, Easier
George Santayana (2009). “The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress”, p.763, The Floating Press

The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

George Santayana
Ignorance, Animal, Expression
George Santayana (1936). “The Works of George Santayana”

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

George Santayana
Love, War, Calling
George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.56, 谷月社

My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

George Santayana
Character, Past, Historical Novels
George Santayana, Martin A. Coleman (2009). “The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings”, p.62, Indiana University Press

If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

George Santayana
Art, Mathematics, Mathematical

In this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express; the choice lies between a mask and a figleaf.

George Santayana
Lying, Expression, Choices
George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana: Soliloquies in England and Later soliloquies”

The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.

George Santayana
Horse, Focus, Mind

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

George Santayana
Shells, Thousand
George Santayana (2015). “Character and Opinion in the United States”, p.36, Sheba Blake Publishing

Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.

George Santayana
Intolerance, Share, Form

Art is a delayed echo.

George Santayana
Art, Echoes, Art Is

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.

George Santayana
Pleasure, Barbarism
George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.55, 谷月社

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