George Santayana Quotes

The power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language.

Philosophy: Impersonal anxiety; refuge among anemic ideas.

Abstraction is everybody's zero but nobody's nought.

I try to write about internal experience versus the external self. I like to present ideas, but not package them neatly.

Humans can think inhuman thoughts.

Abstraction is an esoteric language.

I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot. A tomato is also a child's balloon - Surrealism, again, having suppressed the word "like."

Everything solid was first an idea.

Four years and everything was the same, except me.

We think of the number "five" as applying to appropriate groups of any entities whatsoever - to five fishes, five children, five apples, five days... We are merely thinking of those relationships between those two groups which are entirely independent of the individual essences of any of the members of either group. This is a very remarkable feat of abstraction; and it must have taken ages for the human race to rise to it

When you're younger, think less and do more; when you're older, do less and think more.

When experience contradicts firmly held judgments of self-efficacy, people may not change their beliefs about themselves if the conditions of performance are such as to lead them to discount the import of the experience

In past times when one lived in contact with nature, abstraction was easy; it was done unconsciously. Now in our denaturalized age abstraction becomes an effort.

I thought using three cameras was a lot better than one, because you could see where you were going, where you'd been, and all kinds of things - more like life. I think photography has colored our vision. We're now in an area where it might break something. I think this is a time. I feel it. I don't know whether I'll be here long enough to experience it. I've no plans to leave yet.

You'll understand when you've forgotten what you understood before

Just 'cause somethin' ain't been done Don't mean it can't be did.

It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.

But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.

For what reason then do the realists show themselves so unfriendly toward philosophy? Because they misunderstand their own calling and with all their might want to remain restricted instead of becoming unrestricted! Why do they hate abstractions? Because they themselves are abstract since they abstract from the perfection of themselves, from the elevation of redeeming truth!

If you don't generalize you don't philosophize.

Is it really so terrible being around us?" I blushed. "No," I said. "But . . . it's complicated. I've been taught certain things my entire life. Those are hard to shake." "The greatest changes in history have come because people were able to shake off what others told them to do.

I'm not a comic book character. I'm not Indiana Jones or Bond, I'm a flesh and blood guy who is ageing and changing. I don't have to do what I did in '93. I couldn't do it and thank God.

Transcendence: that which transcends experience.

Once you hear something, you can never return to the time before you heard it.

I've been around a long time, and it seemed for the longest time like I was the young guy. Now, all of a sudden, I've got fans with beards telling me, "I used to watch you when I was a kid." So, I don't know what happened to all those years, but the little bit I do remember? It was definitely a fun ride.