Quotes (#459)

"Music is essentially
useless, as life is."
- George Santayana

"I do not take a single newspaper, nor
read one a month, and I feel myself
infinitely the happier for it."
- Thomas Jefferson

"I owe it all to little
chocolate donuts."
- John Belushi

"The last time anybody made a list of the top
hundred character attributes of New Yorkers,
common sense snuck in at number 79."
- Douglas Adams

"Do you realize if it weren't for Edison
we'd be watching TV by candlelight?"
- Al Boliska

"In heaven all the interesting people are missing."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Quotes - George Santayana

Whoever it was who searched the heavens with
a telescope and found no God would not have
found the human mind if he had searched the
brain with a microscope.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

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 (1863 - 1952)

To be interested in the changing seasons is
a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly
in love with spring.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked
at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952),
Soliloquies in England, 1922, "War Shrines"

Those who speak most of progress measure
it by quantity and not by quality.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

Quotaria - George Santayana

Skepticism, like chastity, should
not be relinquished too readily.
George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

Society is like the air; necessary to
breathe, but insufficient to live on.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

That life is worth living is the most necessary
of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the
most impossible of conclusions.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

The body is an instrument, the mind its function,
the witness and reward of its operation.
George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality
is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

The young man who has not wept is a savage,
and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952),
Dialogues in Limbo (1925) ch. 3

Quotes - George Santayana

America is a young country with an old mentality.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous,
since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.
George Santayana (1863 - 1952),
Winds of Doctrine (1913) ch. 2

Happiness is the only sanction of life;
where happiness fails, existence remains
a mad and lamentable experiment.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952),
Life of Reason (1905) vol. 1, ch. 10

Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and
to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952),
Winds of Doctrine (1913) ch. 4

Matters of religion should never be matters of
controversy. We neither argue with a lover about
his taste, not condemn him, if we are just, for
knowing so human a passion.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have
an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952),
Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 4

Quotes - George Santayana

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument;
its function is to make the worse appear the better.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

"Those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it."
- George Santayana

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable;
what it is or what it means can never be said.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

A child only educated at school is an uneducated child.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed
interests and facilities to be served by travel.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

Quotes - George Santayana

A man's feet should be planted in his country,
but his eyes should survey the world.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

The lover knows much more about absolute good and
universal beauty than any logician or theologian,
unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

The need of exercise is a modern
superstition, invented by people
who ate too much and had nothing
to think about.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

The truth is cruel, but it can be loved,
and it makes free those who have loved it.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952),
Little Essays (1920) "Ideal Immortality"

The world is not respectable; it is mortal,
tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it
is shot through with beauty, with love, with
glints of courage and laughter; and in these,
the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to
the light amid the thorns.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

Quotes - George Santayana

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that
is interested in itself and not in its subject.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952),
Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 8

Our character...is an omen of our destiny, and
the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler
and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952),
"The German Mind: A Philosophical Diagnosis"

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.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952),
The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905

Sanity is a madness put to good use.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

Science is nothing but developed perception,
interpreted intent, common sense rounded out
and minutely articulated.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

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 (1863 - 1952)

Quotes - George Santayana

A man is morally free when, in full possession
of his living humanity, he judges the world, and
judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend,
you should endeavor to understand him.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

Character is the basis of happiness and
happiness the sanction of character.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth
which it takes more or less seriously, proposes
some method of fortifying the human soul and
enabline it to make its peace with its destiny.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your
effort when you have forgotten your aim.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952),
Life of Reason (1905) vol. 1, Introduction

Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things: and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
- George Santayana (1863 - 1952), Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 3