Quote

Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.

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
Constantly
Peace
Affords
Experience
Supplies
Art
Contemplation
Nature
Concrete
Life
Seldom
Union
Unions

More quotes by George Santayana

Image
The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.
George Santayana
Image
The arts must study their occasions they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.
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
Beware of long arguments and long beards.
George Santayana
Image
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.
George Santayana
Image
Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.
George Santayana
Image
Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
George Santayana
Image
He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
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
Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.
George Santayana
Image
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.
George Santayana
Image
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 .
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 line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.
George Santayana
Image
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.
George Santayana
Image
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
George Santayana
Image
There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
George Santayana
Image
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.
George Santayana
Image
Order, for a liberal, means only peace and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.
George Santayana
Image
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
George Santayana