George Santayana: Quotes about life

George Santayana was 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism. Explore interesting quotes on life.
George Santayana: 218 quotes8 likes

“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.”

George Santayana

“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

“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.”

George Santayana

&quot;Materialism and Idealism&quot; p. 175 ( Hathi Trust http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b3923968?urlappend=%3Bseq=191) <br class="br">Character and Opinion in the United States (1920)

“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

“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

“They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life.”

George Santayana

Obiter Scripta (1936)
Other works

“American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.”

George Santayana

&quot;The Academic Environment&quot; p. 47 ( Hathi Trust http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b3923968?urlappend=%3Bseq=63) <br class="br">Character and Opinion in the United States (1920)

“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

“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)