Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.
George Santayana
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Social
Assurance
Assurances
Men
Continually
Convention
Conventions
Suggested
Habits
Originally
Opinions
Borrowed
Conscience
Gather
Habit
Comforting
Opinion
Consensus
More quotes by 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
Reason and happiness are like other flowers they wither when plucked.
George Santayana
Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
George Santayana
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana
Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
George Santayana
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
George Santayana
The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
George Santayana
In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
George Santayana
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
An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
George Santayana
Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
George Santayana
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
George Santayana
Prayer is not a substitute for work it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.
George Santayana
Music is essentially useless, as is life.
George Santayana
One real world is enough.
George Santayana
To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation to elude oneself is the romantic.
George Santayana
O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art.
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
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
George Santayana
It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.
George Santayana
