Quote

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.

George Santayana

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Something
Possess
Recognition
Embrace
Expect
Salutation
Eating
Salutations
Knowledge
Devour
Cannot
Absent
Mean
Nasty

More quotes by George Santayana

Image
We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.
George Santayana
Image
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
Image
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana
Image
Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.
George Santayana
Image
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.
George Santayana
Image
I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.
George Santayana
Image
Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.
George Santayana
Image
Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
George Santayana
Image
Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
George Santayana
Image
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
George Santayana
Image
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
George Santayana
Image
Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
George Santayana
Image
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
George Santayana
Image
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
Image
It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.
George Santayana
Image
Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.
George Santayana
Image
What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
George Santayana
Image
Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.
George Santayana
Image
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.
George Santayana
Image
Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.
George Santayana