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Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
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
Really
Melancholy
Subject
Subjects
Interested
Poor
History
Art
Nothing
More quotes by George Santayana
To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.
George Santayana
Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view as to knowing her through and through that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
George Santayana
The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
George Santayana
Reason and happiness are like other flowers they wither when plucked.
George Santayana
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
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
George Santayana
Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
George Santayana
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
George Santayana
The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.
George Santayana
It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.
George Santayana
Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
George Santayana
Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.
George Santayana
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
George Santayana
A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.
George Santayana
Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.
George Santayana
A simple life is its own reward.
George Santayana
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
George Santayana
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
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.
George Santayana
It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.
George Santayana
