Quote

Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.

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
Thinks
Normal
Nation
Imbecility
Passion
Requisite
Nations
Calls
Less
Folly
Every
Fancy
Thinking
Madness

More quotes by George Santayana

Image
Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
George Santayana
Image
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
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
Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.
George Santayana
Image
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.
George Santayana
Image
Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.
George Santayana
Image
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable what it is or what it means can never be said.
George Santayana
Image
Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.
George Santayana
Image
The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything.
George Santayana
Image
Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
George Santayana
Image
With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
George Santayana
Image
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
George Santayana
Image
It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.
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
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.
George Santayana
Image
An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
George Santayana
Image
The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.
George Santayana
Image
It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
George Santayana
Image
The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
George Santayana
Image
Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
George Santayana