Quote

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.

George Santayana

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Would
Personal
Decline
Life
Walks
Simplicity
Like
Liberty
Possession
World
Sort
Prosperity
Away
Private
Adorn
Beautiful
Among
Frugality
Take
Walk
Aggravation
Things
Wealth
Possessions

More quotes by George Santayana

Image
One real world is enough.
George Santayana
Image
Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
George Santayana
Image
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.
George Santayana
Image
The world is a perpetual caricature of itself at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
George Santayana
Image
The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt, and though a thousand later considerations may overlay and override them, they remain a background and standard for all happiness. If we trace them out we succeed.
George Santayana
Image
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.
George Santayana
Image
A simple life is its own reward.
George Santayana
Image
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
George Santayana
Image
To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.
George Santayana
Image
To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.
George Santayana
Image
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.
George Santayana
Image
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.
George Santayana
Image
My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.
George Santayana
Image
Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.
George Santayana
Image
One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.
George Santayana
Image
Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
George Santayana
Image
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
George Santayana
Image
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
George Santayana
Image
A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
George Santayana
Image
Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
George Santayana