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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.

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
Free
Proper
Breed
Doe
Belong
Universities
Germany
Humane
Philosopher
Gather
Reflection
Philosophers
University
Tendency
Middle
Ages
Scholastic
Age
Tendencies
Scholastics

More quotes by George Santayana

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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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Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals, whereas with us the intervals are all.
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
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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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Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.
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The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.
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I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.
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To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
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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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Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.
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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.
George Santayana
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Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
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Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center.
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Music is essentially useless, as is life.
George Santayana
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Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
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America is a young country with an old mentality.
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The earth has music for those who listen.
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Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.
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We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
George Santayana