Quote

The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.

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
Pleasure
Pleasures
Felt
Compared
Time
Dues
Variety
Mass
Poverty
Suggested
Memories
Superiority
Present
Distant

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Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.
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Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
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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.
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Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
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The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt.
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Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
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A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
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The earth has music for those who listen.
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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.
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It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
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Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent it is a salutation, not an embrace.
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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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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.
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Spirit itself is not human it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?
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Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.
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Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
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Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
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Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
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Habit is stronger than reason.
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... 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.
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