Quote

Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.

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
Inattention
Breeds
Familiarity
Contempt

More quotes by George Santayana

Image
Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.
George Santayana
Image
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
George Santayana
Image
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
George Santayana
Image
Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.
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
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
Image
To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
George Santayana
Image
For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
George Santayana
Image
It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.
George Santayana
Image
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
Image
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
George Santayana
Image
It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.
George Santayana
Image
Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.
George Santayana
Image
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
George Santayana
Image
Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.
George Santayana
Image
The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
George Santayana
Image
Habit is stronger than reason.
George Santayana
Image
Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
George Santayana
Image
Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view as to knowing her through and through that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
George Santayana
Image
The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.
George Santayana