George Santayana: Trending quotes (page 6)

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“In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; … They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.”

George Santayana

Interpretations of Poetry and Religion http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/13960/t3028sf4m?urlappend=%3Bseq=72 (1900), p. 54
Other works

God , World , Religion , Justice

“Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and British in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life, it now believes, is not the pursuit of liberty and happiness of all sorts by all sorts of different creatures; it is the development of a single spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each higher than the preceding one. No man, accordingly, can really or ultimately desire anything but what the best people desire. This is the principle of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all earnest liberals are higher snobs.”

George Santayana

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

Life , People , Happiness

“When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind…They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country.”

George Santayana

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

Country

“… I once shook hands with Longfellow at a garden party in 1881; and I often saw Dr. Holmes, who was our neighbor in Beacon Street: but Emerson I never saw.”

George Santayana

Source: Persons and Places (1944), p. 50

“It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.”

George Santayana

https://owlquote.com/quotes/it-is-veneer-rouge-5g358g7
Other works

Football , Making love , Art

“At midday the daily food of all Spaniards was the puchero or cocido, as the dish is really called which the foreigners call pot-pourri or olla podrida.”

George Santayana

This contains principally yellow chick-peas, with a little bacon, some potatoes or other vegetables and normally also small pieces of beef or sausage, all boiled in one pot at a very slow fire; the liquid of the same makes the substantial broth that is served first.
Source: Persons and Places (1944), p. 14

Food

“I was still “at the church door.””

George Santayana

Yet in belief, in the clarification of my philosophy, I had taken an important step. I no longer wavered between alternative views of the world, to be put on or taken off like alternative plays at the theatre. I now saw that there was only one possible play, the actual history of nature and of mankind, although there might well be ghosts among the characters and soliloquies among the speeches. Religions, all religions, and idealistic philosophies, all idealistic philosophies, were the soliloquies and the ghosts. They might be eloquent and profound. Like Hamlet's soliloquy they might be excellent reflective criticisms of the play as a whole. Nevertheless they were only parts of it, and their value as criticisms lay entirely in their fidelity to the facts, and to the sentiments which those facts aroused in the critic.

p. 169
Persons and Places (1944)