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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
Philosophy
Wisdom
Facile
Root
False
Hunger
Roots

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The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
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Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.
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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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A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.
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Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
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Heaven is to be at peace with things.
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Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
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Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
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A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.
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Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.
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There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
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To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
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Beware of long arguments and long beards.
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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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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.
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Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
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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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It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.
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Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.
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The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.
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