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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
Wisdom
Facile
Root
False
Hunger
Roots
Philosophy

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For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
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When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.
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Man is a fighting animal his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.
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. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.
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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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Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
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The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
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Order, for a liberal, means only peace and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.
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The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
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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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History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
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Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.
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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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Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.
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The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
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The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
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There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.
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Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.
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Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.
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Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.
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