Inspiring Quotes by George Santayana - Page 2

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"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"

"The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients"

"The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise"

"The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art"

"The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape"

"The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy"

"It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well"

"Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors"

"Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better"

"Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots"

"Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy"

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

"It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness"

"It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands"

"It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases"

"One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human"

"Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome"

"Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator"

"Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality"

"Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies"

"Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace"

"For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep"

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

"America is a young country with an old mentality"

"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"

"A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world"

"A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world"

"A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud"

"Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end"

"Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny"

"Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men"

"Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character"

"Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds"

"By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all"

"Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine"

"Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him"

"To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood"

"To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired"

"The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character"

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