George Santayana Quotes - Page 6

Quotes about:

• Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.

  George Santayana

  Love Life, Religion, Consciousness

  George Santayana (2014). “Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion”, p.37, The Floating Press

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• The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence

  George Santayana

  Confidence, Inspire, Quality

  George Santayana (2012). “The Sense of Beauty”, p.154, Courier Corporation

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• Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.

  George Santayana

  Passion, Thinking, Fancy

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

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• Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

  George Santayana

  Men, Comforting, Opinion

  George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.108, 谷月社

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• All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.

  George Santayana

  Language, Poet, Rhetorical

  George Santayana (1955). “Letters”

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• If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.

  George Santayana

  Reality, Hypocrisy, World

  George Santayana (1937). “The Works of George Santayana: Dialogues in limbo. Platonism and the spiritual life. A long way round to Nirvana. The prestige of the infinite. Ultimate religion”

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• In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.

  George Santayana

  Justice, Heaven, World

  "Interpretations of Poetry and Religion" by George Santayana, (p. 54), 1900.

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• The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.

  George Santayana

  Intellectual, Mediocrity, World

  George Santayana, William G. Holzberger (2003). “The Works of George Santayana: The letters of George Santayana. 1933-1936. Vol. 5. Book 5”, p.148, MIT Press

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• Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.

  George Santayana

  Mean, Profound, Culture

  George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.69, 谷月社

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• Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.

  George Santayana

  Function, Dear, Adopted

  The Life of Reason vol. 3, ch. 1 (1905)

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• Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.

  George Santayana

  Men, Heaven, Ridiculous

  George Santayana, Martin A. Coleman (2009). “The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings”, p.319, Indiana University Press

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• Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

  George Santayana

  Men, Dignity, Despise

  George Santayana (1934). “Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana”, p.230, Рипол Классик

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• It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on first, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the parts known give us evidence enough that the unknown parts cannot be much amiss.

  George Santayana

  Friendship, Sight, Giving

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

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• 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

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• The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.

  George Santayana

  Art, Philosophy, Dangerous

  George Santayana (2015). “Character and Opinion in the United States”, p.17, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.

  George Santayana

  People, Opinion, Convinced

  George Santayana (2011). “The Life of Reason: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense”, p.113, MIT Press

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• The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.

  George Santayana

  Soul, Littles, Fruit

  George Santayana, Martin A. Coleman (2009). “The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings”, p.136, Indiana University Press

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• A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

  George Santayana

  Happiness, Happy, Determination

  George Santayana (1945). “The Middle Span”

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• The unforgivable sin is the refusal to pardon.

  George Santayana

  Forgiveness, Unforgivable Sin, Refusal

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• Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They all may collapse altogether.

  George Santayana

  Knowledge, Different, May

  "Persons and Places: My host the world".

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• I have no axe to grind; only my thoughts to burnish.

  George Santayana

  Grind, My Thoughts

  George Santayana (2015). “Character and Opinion in the United States”, p.3, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedism, extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like Buddhism, it had looked only for peace and the liberation of souls. It looked beyond; it dreamt of infinite blisses and crowns it should be crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God... Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with anesthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire.

  George Santayana

  War, Ambition, Buddhism

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• 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.

  George Santayana

  Infancy Is, Progress, Savages

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

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• Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.

  George Santayana

  Confidence, Knowledge, Self

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• Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer; there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.

  George Santayana

  Long, Lasts, Firsts

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

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