Source: Essays In Biography (1933), Preface, p. viii
Context: I have sought with some touches of detail to bring out the solidarity and historical continuity of the High Intelligentsia of England, who have built up the foundations of our thought in the two and a half centuries, since Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, wrote the first modern English book. I relate below the amazing progeny of Sir George Villiers. But the lineage of the High Intelligentsia is hardly less interbred and spiritually inter-mixed. Let the Villiers Connection fascinate the monarch or the mob and rule, or seem to rule, passing events. There is also a pride of sentiment to claim spiritual kinship with the Locke Connection and that long English line, intellectually and humanly linked with one another, to which the names in my second section belong. If not the wisest, yet the most truthful of men. If not the most personable, yet the queerest and sweetest. If not the most practical, yet of the purest public conscience. If not of high artistic genius, yet the most solid and sincere accomplishment within many of the fields which are ranged by the human mind.
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George Santayana 109
20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with P… 1863–1952Related quotes
“The fairest garden in her looks,
And in her mind the wisest books.”
The Garden, i; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Source: Leadership Gold: Lessons I've Learned from a Lifetime of Leading
Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1898)
Context: It has been said that "Nothing worth the proving can be proved, nor yet disproved." True though this may have been in the past, it is true no longer. The science of our century has forged weapons of observation and analysis by which the veriest tyro may profit. Science has trained and fashioned the average mind into habits of exactitude and disciplined perception, and in so doing has fortified itself for tasks higher, wider, and incomparably more wonderful than even the wisest among our ancestors imagined. Like the souls in Plato's myth that follow the chariot of Zeus, it has ascended to a point of vision far above the earth. It is henceforth open to science to transcend all we now think we know of matter and to gain new glimpses of a profounder scheme of Cosmic law.
“The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.”
“No one yet has learned to drive a locomotive sitting in his study.”
Source: Terrorism and Communism (1920), Ch. 7, p. 101
Anarchy and Alchemy: the Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky by Ben Cobb (2007) p. 115