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The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

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
Degree
Degrees
Dignity
Importance
Poet
Imagination
Dominates
Reality
Exact
Ends
Measure

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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.
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Heaven is to be at peace with things.
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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.
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It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
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The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
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We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
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The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
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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.
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Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent it is a salutation, not an embrace.
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It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.
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The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
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A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
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One real world is enough.
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In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
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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.
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The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
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The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
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Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
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Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?
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To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
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