Quote

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

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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
Best
Express
Whole
Fully
Straining
Life
Ideals
Dominates
Towards
Latent
Evolution
Definite
Progress
Vital
Words
Ideal
May
Chosen

More quotes by George Santayana

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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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Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.
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Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.
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Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.
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A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
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Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
George Santayana
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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.
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The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
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To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
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Reason and happiness are like other flowers they wither when plucked.
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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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Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
George Santayana
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A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.
George Santayana
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One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.
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The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
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To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
George Santayana
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The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
George Santayana
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Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.
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Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
George Santayana