George Santayana: Man

George Santayana was 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism. Explore interesting quotes on man.
George Santayana: 218   quotes 8   likes

“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)

Sense , Selfishness

“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

Life , Idea , Effort

“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

Life , Friendship , Religion , Art

“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

For Men , Fools

“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

“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

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

George Santayana

Introduction to The Ethics of Spinoza (1910)

“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

“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