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It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
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
Prig
Libertine
Saint
Easier
Make
More quotes by George Santayana
Man's most serious activity is play.
George Santayana
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
George Santayana
Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
George Santayana
It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.
George Santayana
The earth has music for those who listen.
George Santayana
Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
George Santayana
It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.
George Santayana
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
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
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
George Santayana
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
George Santayana
Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.
George Santayana
Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.
George Santayana
To fight is a radical instinct if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.
George Santayana
To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
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
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
Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.
George Santayana
It is wisdom to believe the heart.
George Santayana
Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.
George Santayana
