Quote

The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.

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
Looking
Hungry
Sense
Satisfaction
Makes
Complete
Everything
Perfection
Things
Demand
Misses
Missing
Shortcomings
Habit
Demands
Beauty
Notice

More quotes by George Santayana

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One real world is enough.
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Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.
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He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
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People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
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Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.
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Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
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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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Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.
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Memory itself is an internal rumour.
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To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
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Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway
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The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them
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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.
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The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
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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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Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
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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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I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.
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The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
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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.
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