Quote

Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

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
Essentially
Ideal
Useless
Ideals
Conditions
Lends
Music
Extension
Life
Utility
Extensions

More quotes by George Santayana

Image
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
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
Habit is stronger than reason.
George Santayana
Image
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
George Santayana
Image
Art is a delayed echo.
George Santayana
Image
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
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
I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.
George Santayana
Image
Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway
George Santayana
Image
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
George Santayana
Image
The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.
George Santayana
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
George Santayana
Image
Wisdom comes from disillusionment.
George Santayana
Image
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
Image
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
George Santayana
Image
Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
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 man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.
George Santayana