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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.
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
Earth
Nietzsche
Might
Asylum
Without
Asylums
Enough
Enthusiasm
Madhouse
Long
Philosophical
Enthusiasts
Expression
Madhouses
Perhaps
Soften
Philosophy
Contradicting
More quotes by George Santayana
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
Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.
George Santayana
Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.
George Santayana
A friend's only gift is himself.
George Santayana
Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.
George Santayana
To fight is a radical instinct if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.
George Santayana
The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.... If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is the spirit.
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
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
George Santayana
The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.
George Santayana
To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.
George Santayana
Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.
George Santayana
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
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
George Santayana
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
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
George Santayana
Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
George Santayana
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
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
George Santayana
All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.
George Santayana
