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We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.

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
Religions
Abandon
Illusion
Vested
Illusions
Irrational

More quotes by George Santayana

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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.
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To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
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Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.
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What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?
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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
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To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
George Santayana
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Man is a fighting animal his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.
George Santayana
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It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.
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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To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
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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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The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
George Santayana
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The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.
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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Wisdom comes from disillusionment.
George Santayana
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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.
George Santayana
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In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
George Santayana
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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
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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.
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I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.
George Santayana