Quote

The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.

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
Everything
Strive
Humans
Horse
Abreast
Enough
General
Strives
Many
Wants
Scheme
Mind
Focus
Strife
Bring
Schemes
Rich
Horses
Human
Drive

More quotes by George Santayana

Image
The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
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
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
There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
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 dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
George Santayana
Image
Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.
George Santayana
Image
Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.
George Santayana
Image
The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
George Santayana
Image
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
George Santayana
Image
. . . 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.
George Santayana
Image
In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.
George Santayana
Image
Prayer is not a substitute for work it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.
George Santayana
Image
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?
George Santayana
Image
The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
George Santayana
Image
Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.
George Santayana
Image
Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
George Santayana
Image
Spirit itself is not human it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?
George Santayana
Image
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
George Santayana
Image
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.
George Santayana