The voices / 103 fragments

George Santayana

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01Undated

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

George Santayana / quote

02Undated

The worship of power is an old religion.

George Santayana / quote

03Undated

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.

George Santayana / quote

04Undated

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

George Santayana / quote

05Undated

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval

George Santayana / quote

06Undated

The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.

George Santayana / quote

07Undated

With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.

George Santayana / quote

08Undated

The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,She makes a sweeter music than is heard.

George Santayana / quote

09Undated

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana / quote

10Undated

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.

George Santayana / quote

11Undated

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

George Santayana / quote

12Undated

Consciousness is a born hermit.

George Santayana / quote

13Undated

The earth has its music for those who will listen.

George Santayana / quote

14Undated

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.

George Santayana / quote

15Undated

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

George Santayana / quote

16Undated

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

George Santayana / quote

17Undated

Depression is rage spread thin.

George Santayana / quote

18Undated

The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.

George Santayana / quote

19Undated

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.

George Santayana / quote

20Undated

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.

George Santayana / quote

21Undated

The man who is not permitted to own is owned.

George Santayana / quote

22Undated

Sanity is a madness put to good uses.

George Santayana / quote

23Undated

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.

George Santayana / quote

24Undated

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions, their reasons are always different.

George Santayana / quote