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It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.
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
Comfort
Scattered
Beauty
Habitual
Past
Smiles
Remember
Remembering
Even
Favour
Reduced
Rare
Instants
Instant
Favours
More quotes by George Santayana
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
George Santayana
Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.
George Santayana
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
Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
George Santayana
What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
George Santayana
Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
George Santayana
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
The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them
George Santayana
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
George Santayana
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
George Santayana
Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view as to knowing her through and through that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
George Santayana
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
George Santayana
Beware of long arguments and long beards.
George Santayana
Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.
George Santayana
The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
George Santayana
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.
George Santayana
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
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
George Santayana
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
George Santayana
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
George Santayana