Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
George Santayana
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Subject
Subjects
Interested
Poor
History
Art
Nothing
Really
Melancholy
More quotes by George Santayana
To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
George Santayana
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
George Santayana
The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
George Santayana
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
George Santayana
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.
George Santayana
Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.
George Santayana
The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
George Santayana
In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.
George Santayana
American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
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
The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.
George Santayana
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
George Santayana
Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.
George Santayana
What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?
George Santayana
The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt.
George Santayana
Docility is the observable half of reason.
George Santayana
