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Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
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
Character
Work
Sanction
Sanctions
Basis
Bases
Happiness
More quotes by George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
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
Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway
George Santayana
Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.
George Santayana
Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
George Santayana
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
George Santayana
Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.
George Santayana
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.
George Santayana
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
George Santayana
Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
George Santayana
The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.
George Santayana
There is nothing sacred about convention there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.
George Santayana
The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.... If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is the spirit.
George Santayana
Prayer is not a substitute for work it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.
George Santayana
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
George Santayana
Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia it is by no means a representative of reason.
George Santayana
