Selected Quotes of George Santayana are:
- A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
- Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or
what it means can never be said.
- 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.
- Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails,
existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
- Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.
- Only the dead have seen the end of war.
- The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man
who will not laugh is a fool.
- There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
- Philosophers are as jealous as women. Each wants a monopoly of
praise.
- Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the
courage to live by grace.
- 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.
- I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the
world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal
possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
- For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as
sleep.
- Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have
forgotten your aim.
- 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.
- Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our
minds.
- Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation
without reason and imitation without benefit.
- Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function
is to make the worse appear the better.
- Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on
retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to
improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when
experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
- It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their
vocation. Most men have no vocation.
- History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might
almost be said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in
memory were not what science necessarily rest on. In order to sift
evidence we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience
before we proceed to expand it. The line between what is known
scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support
knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal
rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the
falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting
and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past
changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original
experience which it purports to describe.
- Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to
balance it.
- Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should
endeavor to understand him.
- The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
- I leave you but the sound of many a word
In mocking echoes haply overheard,
I sang to heaven. My exile made me free,
from world to world, from all worlds carried me.
- O WORLD, thou choosest not the better part!
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart, 5
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul’s invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead 10
Across a void of mystery and dread.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine
By which alone the mortal heart is led
Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
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