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The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.

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
Loftiest
Edifice
Foundations
Deepest
Commitment
Foundation
Need
Needs
Edifices

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We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
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Advertising is the modern substitute for argument its function is to make the worse appear the better.
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Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
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Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center.
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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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A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.
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There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
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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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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.
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Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.
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Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.
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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.
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Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
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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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It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.
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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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What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?
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Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.
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Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
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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.
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