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Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
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
Contemptible
Fatal
Assurance
Confidence
Unless
Knowledge
Self
More quotes by George Santayana
The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.
George Santayana
The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
George Santayana
The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt, and though a thousand later considerations may overlay and override them, they remain a background and standard for all happiness. If we trace them out we succeed.
George Santayana
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana
In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
George Santayana
To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.
George Santayana
Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.
George Santayana
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
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
George Santayana
Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
George Santayana
Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
George Santayana
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
George Santayana
Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
George Santayana
America is a young country with an old mentality.
George Santayana
One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.
George Santayana
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
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 love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
George Santayana
