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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

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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
Sense
Mediums
Form
Theatre
Artifices
Real
Setting
Depicts
Life
Theater
Artifice
Truly
Kindred
Movement
Artificial
Though
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People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
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What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
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Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.
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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.
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Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view as to knowing her through and through that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
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Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals, whereas with us the intervals are all.
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It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
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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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For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
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The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive
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The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
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The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.
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It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.
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What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art .
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The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices.
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To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
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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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Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.
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