George Santayana: Trending quotes

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

“That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.”

George Santayana

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

“The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.”

George Santayana

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

“What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.”

George Santayana

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

“Santayana, indeed, is the Moses of the new naturalism, who discerned the promised land from afar but still wanders himself in the desert realms of being.”

George Santayana

John Herman Randall, "The Nature of Naturalism", epilogue to Naturalism and the Human Spirit (1944)
Misattributed

“No doubt the spirit or energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves.”

George Santayana

Source: Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion (1913), p. 199

“The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.”

George Santayana

The Idea of Christ in the Gospels (1946)
Other works

“All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.”

George Santayana

Source: Dialogues in Limbo (1926), Ch. 3, P. 62

“To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together.”

George Santayana

"The Irony of Liberalism"
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

“England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors.”

George Santayana

"The British Character"
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

“Liberalism has merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate interest may fight with every other for domination. Whoever is victorious in this struggle will make an end of liberalism; and the new order, which will deem itself saved, will have to defend itself in the following age against a new crop of rebels.”

George Santayana

"The Irony of Liberalism"
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

“The soul, too, has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.”

George Santayana

&quot;Normal Madness,&quot; Ch. 3, P. 56 http://books.google.com/books?id=apSwAAAAIAAJ&amp;q=%22The+soul+too+has+her+virginity+and+must+bleed+a+little+before+bearing+fruit%22&amp;pg=PA56#v=onepage <br class="br">Dialogues in Limbo (1926)

“In solitude it is possible to love mankind; in the world, for one who knows the world, there can be nothing but secret or open war.”

George Santayana

Source: Persons and Places (1944), p. 159

“[The empiricist] thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.”

George Santayana book Scepticism and Animal Faith

"Objections to Belief in Substance", p. 201
Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)

“Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.”

George Santayana

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. IV, Reason in Art

“When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.”

George Santayana

Ch. VI: Free Society http://books.google.com/books?id=ICAsAAAAYAAJ&amp;q=%22When+men+and+women+agree+it+is+only+in+their+conclusions+their+reasons+are+always+different%22&amp;pg=PA148#v=onepage <br class="br">The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. II, Reason in Society

“The working of great administrations is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.”

George Santayana

Giorgio de Santillana (1902-1974) The Crime of Galileo http://books.google.com/books?id=34uQ6tlYHRgC&amp;q=%22The+working+of+great+administrations+is+mainly+the+result+of+a+vast+mass+of+routine+petty+malice+self-interest+carelessness+and+sheer+mistake+Only+a+residual+fraction+is+thought%22&amp;pg=PA290#v=onepage (1958) <br class="br">Many sources mistakenly attribute this quote to Santayana, and one http://books.google.com/books?id=e4tzpkw4caAC&amp;q=%22The+working+of+great+institutions+is+mainly+the+result+of+a+vast+mass+of+routine+petty+malice+self-interest+carelessness+and+sheer+mistake+Only+a+residual+fraction+is+thought%22&amp;pg=PA283#v=onepage even identifies the correct book, without realizing that George Santayana and Giorgio de Santillana are two different people <br class="br">Misattributed

“The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.”

George Santayana

Source: Little Essays (1921), p. 107

“To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.”

George Santayana

Source: The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. II, Reason in Society, Ch. III: Industry, Government, and War

“The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.”

George Santayana

Source: Dialogues in Limbo (1926), Ch. 3, P. 57

“Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master.”

George Santayana

"The British Character"
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)