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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
Abandon
Illusion
Vested
Illusions
Irrational
Religions

More quotes by George Santayana

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We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
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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.
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America is a young country with an old mentality.
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Habit is stronger than reason.
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To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.
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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.
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Memory itself is an internal rumour.
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The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
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Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
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The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them
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Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
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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.
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
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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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The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
George Santayana
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Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
George Santayana
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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
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The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
George Santayana
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Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
George Santayana