George Santayana Quotes - Page 2

In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
George Santayana
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable what it is or what it means can never be said.
George Santayana
An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
George Santayana
Art is a delayed echo.
George Santayana
If artists and poets are unhappy it is after all because happiness does not interest them.
George Santayana
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.
George Santayana
Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo The Last Puritan and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. 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
Before you contradict an old man my fair friend you should endeavour to understand him.
George Santayana
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
George Santayana
To knock a thing down especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle is a deep delight to the blood.
George Santayana
There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions, their reasons are always different.
George Santayana
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.
George Santayana
Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
George Santayana
The man who is not permitted to own is owned.
George Santayana
The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.
George Santayana
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
George Santayana
The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.
George Santayana
Depression is rage spread thin.
George Santayana
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
George Santayana
Music is essentially useless, as life is.
George Santayana
The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its total temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition; and candor and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost.
George Santayana
The earth has its music for those who will listen.
George Santayana
Consciousness is a born hermit.
George Santayana
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
George Santayana
We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
George Santayana
Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
George Santayana
With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.
George Santayana
The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.
George Santayana
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval
George Santayana
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
To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.
George Santayana
The worship of power is an old religion.
George Santayana
love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
George Santayana