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Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.

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
Justification
Sake
Bring
Experience
Uselessness
Done
Presumed
Accusation
Utility
Fatal

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Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.
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Docility is the observable half of reason.
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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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Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
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Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.
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What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word--the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.
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With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
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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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It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
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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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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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To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
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There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
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The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
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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.
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Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.
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Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
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It is wisdom to believe the heart.
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Memory itself is an internal rumour.
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The earth has music for those who listen.
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