99+ George Santayana Quotes on Madness, Past and Atheism - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous George Santayana quotes. There are more than 99+ quotes in our George Santayana quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning George Santayana wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like Madness, Past and Atheism

The ultimate intuitions on which ethics rests are not debatable, for they are not opinions we hazard but preferences we feel; and it can neither be correct nor incorrect that we feel them.

It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.

Life is an art not to be learned by observation.

It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.

Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.

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.

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

Firsts Quotes

It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.

Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.

A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.

A friend’s only gift is himself.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.

In any close society it is more urgent to restrain others than to be free oneself. Hence the tendency for the central authority to absorb and supersede such as are local or delegated.

The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.

It is a great bond to dislike the same things.

Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.

Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.

All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man’s natural sentiment in the face of death.

A man’s memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.

The degree in which a poet’s imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.

Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.

The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.

Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities.

It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.

The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its total temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition; and candor and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost.

Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.

I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.

It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.

Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.

The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.

If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.

It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.

Country Quotes

Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.

For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.

The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence.

The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend, because he has not imagination enough to sympathize with their proper needs nor humility enough to respect them as if they were his own. Arrogance, fanaticism, meddlesomeness, and imperialism may then masquerade as philanthropy.

To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.

In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.

Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one’s fine feelings, on one’s indomitable optimism and trust in life.

Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.

1
2
3
4
5