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American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.
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
Powerful
Aliens
American
Element
Seems
Optimism
Neutralize
America
Native
Solvent
May
Elements
Thoughtlessness
Every
However
Fuse
Good
Tough
Complacency
Life
Intellectual
Alien
More quotes by George Santayana
Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.
George Santayana
When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.
George Santayana
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
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
It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.
George Santayana
If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.
George Santayana
He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
George Santayana
Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.
George Santayana
The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.... If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is the spirit.
George Santayana
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
George Santayana
The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
George Santayana
The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything.
George Santayana
Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
George Santayana
My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.
George Santayana
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
George Santayana
Beware of long arguments and long beards.
George Santayana
The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
George Santayana
Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
George Santayana