Quote

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 .

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
Life
Gives
Moral
Renders
Society
Aims
Religion
Imaginative
Science
Existed
Art
Aim
Giving
Solitude
Men
Friendship

More quotes by George Santayana

Image
Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.
George Santayana
Image
The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
George Santayana
Image
Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
George Santayana
Image
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
Image
Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.
George Santayana
Image
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
George Santayana
Image
Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
George Santayana
Image
Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.
George Santayana
Image
Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, Please strike here!
George Santayana
Image
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
George Santayana
Image
Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.
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
To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.
George Santayana
Image
Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.
George Santayana
Image
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
George Santayana
Image
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
George Santayana
Image
Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.
George Santayana
Image
Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.
George Santayana
Image
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
George Santayana
Image
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana