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The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

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
Roots
Philosophy
Wisdom
Facile
Root
False
Hunger

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What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.
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The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.
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Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway
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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.
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Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.
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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 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.
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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 wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken with to themselves.
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A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.
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Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
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Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
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Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable what it is or what it means can never be said.
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We are not compelled in naturalism, or even in materialism, to ignore immaterial things the point is that any immaterial things which are recognized shall be regarded as names, aspects, functions, or concomitant products of those physical things among which action goes on.
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Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, Please strike here!
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
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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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Prayer is not a substitute for work it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.
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If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
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What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
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