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Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.
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
Mortals
Center
Asked
Circumstances
Truth
Favorable
Even
Seize
Wholeness
Mortal
More quotes by 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
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
George Santayana
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
Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.
George Santayana
Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.
George Santayana
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
George Santayana
Beware of long arguments and long beards.
George Santayana
Memory itself is an internal rumour and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.
George Santayana
A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
George Santayana
Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
George Santayana
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
George Santayana
A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.
George Santayana
Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.
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
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
George Santayana
Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia it is by no means a representative of reason.
George Santayana
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
George Santayana
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
George Santayana
... even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.
George Santayana
