Book detail: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
'Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana' is a compilation that presents a selection of essays from the extensive body of work by George Santayana. These essays reflect Santayana's philosophical musings, cultural observations, and personal reflections, offering readers a glimpse into his intellectual journey and thought process.
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“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.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“One real world is enough.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“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 queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“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.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and aesthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“It is the acme of life to understand life.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana