Quote

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

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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
Ever
Calling
Marries
Little
Lies
Therein
Different
Danger
Tragedies
Things
Greatest
Identical
Word
Wedding
Lying
Charm
Two
Innocence
Littles
Tragedy
Identifies

More quotes by George Santayana

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Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
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The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.
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People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
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America is a young country with an old mentality.
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Beware of long arguments and long beards.
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Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
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Man is a fighting animal his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.
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I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.
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Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.
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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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When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.
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. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.
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To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.
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The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
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Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
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Prayer is not a substitute for work it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
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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.
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The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything.
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Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
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