Quote

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

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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
Men
Demands
Allow
Constant
Demand
Pleasure
Incidental
Understanding
Indulgence
Eye
Belly
Heart
Pleasures

More quotes by George Santayana

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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.
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Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.
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In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.
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We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
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Oaths are the fossils of piety.
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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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History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
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Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.
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It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
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The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
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If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
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Advertising is the modern substitute for argument its function is to make the worse appear the better.
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Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.
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Beware of long arguments and long beards.
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.
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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.
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Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.
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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?
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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.
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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 .
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