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Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

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
Popular
Ancient
Poet
Retailing
Poetry
Parish
Public
Converted
Since
Muse
Long
Priests
Poets

More quotes by George Santayana

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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
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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.
George Santayana
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To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
George Santayana
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For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
George Santayana
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Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
George Santayana
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The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
George Santayana
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The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.
George Santayana
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Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
George Santayana
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Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.
George Santayana
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Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
George Santayana
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... so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected it is recognised and obeyed.
George Santayana
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The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
George Santayana
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Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.
George Santayana
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Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
George Santayana
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Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
George Santayana
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The arts must study their occasions they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.
George Santayana
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Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.
George Santayana