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Quote by George Santayana

“My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.”

Quote by George Santayana

Book:The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings

Work

The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings

This volume includes a selection of George Santayana's most significant writings, offering insights into his philosophical thought, aesthetics, and cultural commentary. Santayana's work is characterized by its wit, clarity, and depth, exploring themes of knowledge, reality, and the human condition. more

Author

George Santayana

George Santayana was an American philosopher, essayist, and critic renowned for his unique philosophical thoughts and profound insights into culture, art, and science. His philosophy emphasizes individualism, naturalism, and pragmatism, and his works have had a profound impact on 20th-century philosophy and culture. more

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“Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.”

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Book:The Life of Reason: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense

Source: The Life of Reason: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense

“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

“Man alone knows that he must die; but that very knowledge raises him, in a sense, above mortality, by making him a sharer in the vision of eternal truth. He becomes the spectator of his own tragedy; he sympathizes so much with the fury of the storm that he has no ears left for the shipwrecked sailor, though the sailor were his own soul. The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.”

Knows Men Soul Dies Left Vision Truth Is Eternal Ears Tragedy Raises Storm Mortality Spectators Fury Sailor

Author:George Santayana

“By "essence" I understand a universal, of any degree of complexity and definition, which may be given immediately, whether to sense or to thought.... This object of pure sense or pure thought, with no belief superadded, an object inwardly complete and individual, but without external relations or physical status, is what I call an essence.”

May Individual Belief Given Objects Pure Degrees Essence Universal Relation Definitions Complexity

Author:George Santayana

“One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.”

Ideas Feelings America Virtue Evidence Argument Mere Abandoned Speculation Bye Good Bye Predecessors

Book:Character and Opinion in the United States

Source: Character and Opinion in the United States

“Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.”

Men Long Action He Man Speech Argument Steady Beard Brevity

Book:The Works of George Santayana

Source: The Works of George Santayana

“If Kitchener was not a great man, he was, at least, a great poster.”

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Author:Margot Asquith

“The soul that feeds on books alone - I count that soul exceeding small That lives alone by book and creed, - A soul that has not learned to read.”

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“Be busy in trading, receiving, and giving, for life is too good to be wasted in living.”

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Book:The Poetical Works of John Sterling

Source: The Poetical Works of John Sterling

“I've seen enough crazy shots to know they happen in the best of families.”

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Book:The snake in the sandtrap (and other misadventures on the golf tour)

Source: The snake in the sandtrap (and other misadventures on the golf tour)