Quote

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

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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
Age
Turmoil
Spirit
Dwell
Young
Enter
Aging
Better
Adventure
Human
Except
Humans
Quiet
Undisturbed
Nothing
Perhaps
Inherently

More quotes by George Santayana

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Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
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The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
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Music is essentially useless, as is life.
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A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.
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People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.
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The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken with to themselves.
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Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
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In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
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Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.
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Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
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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.
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We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
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To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
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To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.
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To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
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The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.
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Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
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The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all they express merely physical antipathies.
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.
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