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For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.

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
Acceptable
Adversity
Tried
Gold
Fire
Men
Furnace
Furnaces

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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.
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Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
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To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
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I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
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Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals, whereas with us the intervals are all.
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Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
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Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
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The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
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History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
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Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.
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It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.
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The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.
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In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.
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The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
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A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.
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To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.
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That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
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It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.
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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.
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Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.
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