George Santayana: Trending quotes

George Santayana trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection
George Santayana: 218 quotes8 likes

“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.”

George Santayana

“Memory… is an internal rumor.”

George Santayana

“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”

George Santayana

"War Shrines"
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

“Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”

George Santayana

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense

“The wisest mind has something yet to learn.”

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.”

George Santayana

“The Bible is literature, not dogma.”

George Santayana

Introduction to The Ethics of Spinoza (1910)

“Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.”

George Santayana

George Santayana, as quoted in Quotations for Our Time (1977) edited by Laurence J. Peter
Other works

“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.”

George Santayana

“Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.”

George Santayana

Introduction to The Ethics of Spinoza (1910)

“In proportion as a man's interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates and expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach the same impersonal level of ideas.”

George Santayana

Source: The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. II, Reason in Society, Ch. VIII: Ideal Society

“Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.”

George Santayana

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense

“All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.”

George Santayana

&quot;Materialism and Idealism&quot; p. 175 ( Hathi Trust http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b3923968?urlappend=%3Bseq=191) <br class="br">Character and Opinion in the United States (1920)

“Although a poem be not made by counting of syllables upon the fingers, yet "numbers" is the most poetical synonym we have for verse, and "measure" the most significant equivalent for beauty, for goodness, and perhaps even for truth. Those early and profound philosophers, the followers of Pythagoras, saw the essence of all things in number, and it was by weight, measure, and number, as we read in the Bible, that the Creator first brought Nature out of the void.”

George Santayana

Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), p. 251
Other works

“Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor.”

George Santayana

Source: The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. III, Reason in Religion, Ch. XIV

“Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.”

George Santayana

Source: The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1911), p. 58