George Santayana quotes - page 10

The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt. (George Santayana)
To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful. View quote
George Santayana
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. View quote
George Santayana
It is a pleasant surprise to him (the pure mathematician) and an added problem if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them, much as if a composer found that sailors could heave better when singing his songs. View quote
George Santayana
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer. View quote
George Santayana
To fight is a radical instinct if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions. View quote
George Santayana
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles. View quote
George Santayana
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. View quote
George Santayana
Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience. View quote
George Santayana
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different. View quote
George Santayana
Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together. (George Santayana)
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. View quote
George Santayana
Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. View quote
George Santayana
In Walt Whitman democracy is carried into psychology and morals. View quote
George Santayana
By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human. View quote
George Santayana
Santayana, indeed, is the Moses of the new naturalism, who discerned the promised land from afar but still wanders himself in the desert realms of being. View quote
George Santayana
But what a perfection of rottenness in a philosophy! View quote
George Santayana
In America literary reputations come and go so swiftly," I complained, fatuously. [Santayana's] answer was swift. "It would be insufferable if they did not. View quote
George Santayana
"There is no God, and Mary is his mother." Often, almost certainly incorrectly, attributed to Santayana himself. More plausibly attributed to Robert Lowell, as a sardonic description of Santayana's philosophy. View quote
George Santayana
At midday the daily food of all Spaniards was the puchero or cocido, as the dish is really called which the foreigners call pot-pourri or olla podrida. View quote
George Santayana
I was still "at the church door.”. (George Santayana)
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato. View quote
George Santayana
Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable, precisely, the balance and wisdom that come from long perspectives and broad foundations. View quote
George Santayana
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. View quote
George Santayana
To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of the content. View quote
George Santayana