Quote

The arts must study their occasions they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.

George Santayana

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Must
Slips
Life
Aside
Occasions
Arts
Stand
Study
Fitly
Artist
Modestly
Art
Slip

More quotes by George Santayana

Image
A friend's only gift is himself.
George Santayana
Image
Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
George Santayana
Image
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.
George Santayana
Image
O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art.
George Santayana
Image
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
Image
Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.
George Santayana
Image
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
Image
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.
George Santayana
Image
Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.
George Santayana
Image
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
George Santayana
Image
Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.
George Santayana
Image
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
George Santayana
Image
My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.
George Santayana
Image
Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.
George Santayana
Image
Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.
George Santayana
Image
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana
Image
There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.
George Santayana
Image
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
George Santayana
Image
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.
George Santayana
Image
The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
George Santayana