A collection of quotes and thoughts by George Santayana on past, condemned, repeat, earth, reason, goodbye, meaning, fail, learn, aphorisms, hobbies and nature.
71 Insightful Quotes By George Santayana On Music, History, Life, Books And More
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Famous As:
Philosopher, Essayist, Poet, & Novelist
George Santayana was an illustrious essayist, philosopher, novelist and poet. Though he belonged to Spain, and was raised and educated in America since the age of eight. He held a valid Spanish passport, but identified himself as American. He wrote his essays, books, novels and poems in English and is distinguished as American ‘Man of Letters’. Popularly known for his thoughts, views and aphorisms, his writings, essays, quotes, thoughts and sayings are till date quoted extensively. Though he was an atheist, he valued Spanish Catholic beliefs, practices and values. He untimely left his job and moved to Europe, never to return. Here is a corpus of some notable quotes and thoughts by George Santayana on men, women, masterpieces, love, life, history, future, respect, war, dead, educated, act, dreams, school, child, patriotism, soul, knowledge, recognition, tyranny etc which have been excerpted from his poems, novels, writings, books, essays, work and life.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
George Santayana
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.
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
George Santayana
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
George Santayana
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
George Santayana
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there. . . . History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
George Santayana
The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests.
The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about. Athletics don’t make anybody long-lived or useful.
The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad.
George Santayana
The body must be loosely clad if the mind is to forget it and impetuously lead its own life.
I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
