Quote

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

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
Conception
Symbols
Reducible
Daily
Hype
Small
Symbol
Experience
Fraud
Change
Articles
Like
Consumption
Currency

More quotes by George Santayana

Image
The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
George Santayana
Image
The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
George Santayana
Image
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.
George Santayana
Image
A friend's only gift is himself.
George Santayana
Image
The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill 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
Image
Spirit itself is not human it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?
George Santayana
Image
A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.
George Santayana
Image
Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
George Santayana
Image
We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.
George Santayana
Image
The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.
George Santayana
Image
Reason and happiness are like other flowers they wither when plucked.
George Santayana
Image
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
Image
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
George Santayana
Image
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
George Santayana
Image
. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.
George Santayana
Image
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
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
In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
George Santayana
Image
Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.
George Santayana
Image
Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.
George Santayana