Quote

To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.

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
Truth
Part
Refusals
Better
Boosted
Live
Decayed
Mind
Infection
Really
Refusal
Harmony
Illusion

More quotes by George Santayana

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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.
George Santayana
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There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.
George Santayana
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Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.
George Santayana
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A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.
George Santayana
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It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.
George Santayana
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Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.
George Santayana
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. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.
George Santayana
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Spirit itself is not human it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?
George Santayana
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The world is not respectable it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
George Santayana
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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
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why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.
George Santayana
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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
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Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
George Santayana
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We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.
George Santayana
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History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
George Santayana
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The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.
George Santayana
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.
George Santayana
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Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
George Santayana
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In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.
George Santayana
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The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
George Santayana