Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
George Santayana
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Prove
Waiting
Cannot
Validity
Ideal
Realization
Ideals
Wait
More quotes by George Santayana
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
Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
George Santayana
Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway
George Santayana
Man is a fighting animal his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.
George Santayana
A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.
George Santayana
Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
George Santayana
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
George Santayana
It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.
George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
The earth has music for those who listen.
George Santayana
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
I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.
George Santayana
The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.
George Santayana
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
Wisdom comes from disillusionment.
George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, Please strike here!
George Santayana
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
George Santayana
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
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
