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George Santayana Quotes
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Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known in English as George Santayana , was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. Originally from Spain, Santayana was raised and educated in the United States from the age of eight and identified himself as an American, although he always retained a valid Spanish passport. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters. At the age of forty-eight, Santayana left his position at Harvard and returned to Europe permanently, never to return to the United States.

Santayana is popularly known for aphorisms, such as "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", "Only the dead have seen the end of war", and the definition of beauty as "pleasure objectified". Although an atheist, he treasured the Spanish Catholic values, practices, and worldview in which he was raised. Santayana was a broad-ranging cultural critic spanning many disciplines. He was profoundly influenced by Spinoza's life and thought; and, in many respects, was a devoted Spinozist.



Wikipedia  

✵ 16. December 1863 – 26. September 1952
George Santayana photo
George Santayana: 109   quotes 8   likes

George Santayana Quotes

“The mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a truth.”

George Santayana

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

Truth

“But what a perfection of rottenness in a philosophy!”

George Santayana

William James, of Santayana's The Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900), in a letter to George H. Palmer (1900), as quoted in George Santayana : A Biography (2003) by John McCormick
Misattributed

Perfection

“The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.”

George Santayana

"Dickens"
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

World

“Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.”

George Santayana

"On My Friendly Critics"
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

“Prosperity, both for individuals and for states, means possessions; and possessions mean burdens and harness and slavery; and slavery for the mind, too, because it is not only the rich man's time that is pre-empted, but his affections, his judgement, and the range of his thoughts.”

George Santayana

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

Time

“The highest form of vanity is love of fame.”

George Santayana

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

Love

“To know how just a cause we have for grieving is already a consolation.”

George Santayana

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

“Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.”

George Santayana

Source: Dialogues in Limbo (1926), Ch. 4

Religion , Courage

“The living have never shown me how to live.”

George Santayana

"On My Friendly Critics"
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

“Most men’s conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.”

George Santayana

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

Men

“It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.”

George Santayana

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

Men

“Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble, it must remain rare, if common, it must become mean.”

George Santayana

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

“Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.”

George Santayana

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

Fate , World

“Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole world is doing things.”

George Santayana

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

World , Understanding

“In America literary reputations come and go so swiftly," I complained, fatuously. [Santayana's] answer was swift. "It would be insufferable if they did not.”

George Santayana

Gore Vidal, in Palimpsest, A Memoir (1995)
Misattributed

“Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.”

George Santayana

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

Religion , Lovers , Passion

“Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.”

George Santayana book The Sense of Beauty

Pt. IV, Expression; § 67: "Conclusion.", p. 270
The Sense of Beauty (1896)

Faith , Beauty , Soul , Nature

“There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.”

George Santayana

The Genteel Tradition at Bay (1931)
Other works

“Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.”

George Santayana

Introduction to The Ethics of Spinoza (1910)

“Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.”

George Santayana

Introduction to The Ethics of Spinoza (1910)

Nature

“Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.”

George Santayana

Source: Persons and Places (1944), p. 61

Age , Peace , Solitude , Animals

“Religions are not true or false, but better or worse.”

George Santayana

This statement is presented in quotes in The Philosophy of Religion and Advaita Vedanta (2008) by Arvind Sharma, p. 216, as a "Santayanan point", but earlier publications by the same author, such as in A Primal Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion‎ (2006), p. 161, state it to be a stance of Santayana without actually indicating or in any ways implying that it is a direct quotation.
Disputed

Religion , Falseness

“Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature's meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal.”

George Santayana

Source: The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. V, Reason in Science, Ch. 3 "Mechanism"

World , Imagination , Mathematics , Nature

“Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.”

George Santayana book Scepticism and Animal Faith

The Works of George Santayana p. 65
Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)

Youth , Happiness

“The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.”

George Santayana

Source: The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1911), p. 60

“It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy;”

George Santayana

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

Soul

“Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its Christianity, in practice, must be largely converted to paganism.”

George Santayana

Source: Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion (1913), p. 36

“"There is no God, and Mary is his mother." Often, almost certainly incorrectly, attributed to Santayana himself. More plausibly attributed to Robert Lowell, as a sardonic description of Santayana's philosophy.”

George Santayana

Paul Mariani, "Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell" (1994), p. 159
Misattributed

God

“[Everything] ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development.”

George Santayana

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

Nature

“Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram… he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.”

George Santayana

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

Men , God , Religion , Time

“Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.”

George Santayana

https://owlquote.com/quotes/happiness-is-the-only-2jy3r26
The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense

Life , Madness , Happiness

“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)