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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 .
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
Giving
Solitude
Men
Friendship
Life
Gives
Moral
Renders
Society
Aims
Religion
Imaginative
Science
Existed
Art
Aim
More quotes by George Santayana
The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt, and though a thousand later considerations may overlay and override them, they remain a background and standard for all happiness. If we trace them out we succeed.
George Santayana
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
George Santayana
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
George Santayana
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.
George Santayana
The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.
George Santayana
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
I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.
George Santayana
Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.
George Santayana
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
There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
George Santayana
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
George Santayana
To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.
George Santayana
Memory itself is an internal rumour and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.
George Santayana
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
George Santayana
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
George Santayana
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
George Santayana
It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.
George Santayana
Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
George Santayana
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
George Santayana
For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
George Santayana
