George Santayana

George Santayana was a philosopher, essayist poet and novelist.

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• 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,
  Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;
  To trust the soul’s invincible surmise
  Was all his science and his only art.
  • O World, Thou Choosest Not (1894)

• In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; as when we hear that to him that hath shall be given and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Such characterizations appeal to our sense of fact. They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour. For we naturally seek to express his awful actuality, his unchallengeable power, no less than his holiness and his beauty.
  • Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900)

• American life is a powerful solvent. 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.
  • Character and Opinion in the United States (1920)

• 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.
  • Character and Opinion in the United States

• There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.
  • The Genteel Tradition at Bay (1931)

• 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.
  • Obiter Scripta (1936)

• 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.
  • The Poet's Testament

The Sense of Beauty (1896)

• The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.
  • Pt. III, Form

• Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.
  • Pt. IV, Expression

• 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.
  • Pt. IV, Expression

Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense

• Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

• Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

• That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

• Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

• 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.
  • This famous statement has produced many paraphrases and variants:
    Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
    Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes.
    Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it.
    Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.

Vol. II, Reason in Society

• The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

• 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.

• To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
  • Ch. III: Industry, Government, and War

• It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.
  • Ch. IV: The Aristocratic Ideal

• Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.
  • Ch. IV: The Aristocratic Ideal

• 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.
  • Ch. V: Democracy

Vol. III, Reason in Religion

• The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men’s minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.
  • Santayana's response to Francis Bacon's statement that "A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."

• 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.

• Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

• Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

Vol. V, Reason in Science

• 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.
  • Ch. 2 "History"

• 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.

Introduction to The Ethics of Spinoza (1910)

• Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.

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

• Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

• The Bible is literature, not dogma.

Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

• England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors.
  • The British Character

• The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
  • Dickens

• There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
  • War Shrines

• 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.
  • The Irony of Liberalism

• Only the dead have seen the end of war.
  • Tipperary

• My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
  • On My Friendly Critics

• The living have never shown me how to live.
  • On My Friendly Critics

• Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
  • On My Friendly Critics

Dialogues in Limbo (1926)

• All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.

• The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
  • Ch. 3

• 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.
  • Ch. 4

Disputed

• Religions are not true or false, but better or worse.
  • This is statement is presented in quotes in The Philosophy of Religion and Advaita Vedanta (2008) by Arvind Sharma, p. 216, as a "Santayanan point", but earlier publications by the same author, such as in A Primal Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion‎ (2006), p. 161, state it to be a stance of Santayana without actually indicating or in any ways implying that it is a direct quotation.

Quotes about Santayana

• "In America literary reputations come and go so swiftly," I complained, fatuously. [Santayana's] answer was swift. "It would be insufferable if they did not."
  • Gore Vidal, in Palimpsest, a memoir.