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Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.

George Santayana

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George Santayana
Age: 88 †
Born: 1863
Born: October 2
Died: 1952
Died: September 16
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Madrid
Spain
Jorge Santayana
Jorge Augustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana
Jorge Augustin Nicolas Ruiz de Santayana
George Santayana
Terrorism
Overcoming
Terror
Sense
Finitude
Men
Inferiority
Selfishness
Overcome
Selfish

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Advertising is the modern substitute for argument its function is to make the worse appear the better.
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The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
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Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?
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The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices.
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Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
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One real world is enough.
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Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.
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Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.
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For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
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Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view as to knowing her through and through that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
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It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.
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What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
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It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.
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All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.
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The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
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The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
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A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.
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Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center.
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Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent it is a salutation, not an embrace.
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Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.
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