George Santayana: Trending quotes (page 2)

“Memory… is an internal rumor.”

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

“Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.”

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

“love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.”

“The wisest mind has something yet to learn.”

“Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”

“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.”

“The Bible is literature, not dogma.”

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

“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.”

“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.”