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Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
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
Capacity
Perhaps
True
Men
Hardiness
Despise
Dignity
More quotes by George Santayana
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
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.
George Santayana
Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.
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
Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.
George Santayana
For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
George Santayana
The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
George Santayana
Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
George Santayana
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
George Santayana
Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.
George Santayana
If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
George Santayana
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
George Santayana
The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt.
George Santayana
Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.
George Santayana
Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.
George Santayana
Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.
George Santayana
The world is not respectable it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
George Santayana
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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
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
