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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

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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
Opinion
Consensus
Social
Assurance
Assurances
Men
Continually
Convention
Conventions
Suggested
Habits
Originally
Opinions
Borrowed
Conscience
Gather
Habit
Comforting

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What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
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Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.
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People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
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To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
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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.
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A simple life is its own reward.
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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.
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Man's most serious activity is play.
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Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
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To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
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Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
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Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.
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Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
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It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
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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.
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An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
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A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
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Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.
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Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
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Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.
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