Quote

Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.

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
Intellectual
Cities
Principles
Applying
Moral
Nursery
Firsts
Trifles
First
Boston
Always
Principal
Busy

More quotes by George Santayana

Image
The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.
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
To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
George Santayana
Image
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
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
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
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
George Santayana
Image
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
George Santayana
Image
Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.
George Santayana
Image
A simple life is its own reward.
George Santayana
Image
Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
George Santayana
Image
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
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
The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.
George Santayana
Image
why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.
George Santayana
Image
Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.
George Santayana
Image
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
Image
Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
George Santayana
Image
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
George Santayana
Image
Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia it is by no means a representative of reason.
George Santayana