Quote

I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.

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
Imagination
Nothing
Real
Alien
Aliens
Fantasy

More quotes by George Santayana

Image
It is wisdom to believe the heart.
George Santayana
Image
Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
George Santayana
Image
Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
George Santayana
Image
American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
George Santayana
Image
The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
George Santayana
Image
The world is not respectable it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
George Santayana
Image
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.
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
Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
George Santayana
Image
The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.
George Santayana
Image
To fight is a radical instinct if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.
George Santayana
Image
We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.
George Santayana
Image
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
George Santayana
Image
Reason and happiness are like other flowers they wither when plucked.
George Santayana
Image
We are not compelled in naturalism, or even in materialism, to ignore immaterial things the point is that any immaterial things which are recognized shall be regarded as names, aspects, functions, or concomitant products of those physical things among which action goes on.
George Santayana
Image
In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.
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
Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.
George Santayana
Image
Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
George Santayana
Image
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
George Santayana