George Santayana Quotes

One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.

It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry.

Poets by Death are conquer'd but the wit Of poets triumphs over it.

Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing. It embodies, indeed, something better thanthe metaphysics of the Stone Age, namely, as was said, the inherited experience and acumen of many generations of men.

Every age must look for its sanction to its poetry and philosophy, for in these the human mind, as it looks backward or forward, attains to an eternal state.

Computers will have to learn that when I quote from some old author who spelled differently from the machine, the wishes of the long-dead author will have to be respected, and the machine will have to mind its manners

poets are privileged to utter more than they can always quite explain, bringing up from the mind's unplumbed depths tokens of the nature of the world we carry within us.

The ladies who try to keep their beauty are the ladies who lose it.

[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.

Our minds must relax: they will rise better and keener after rest. Just as you must not force fertile farmland, as uninterrupted productivity will soon exhaust it, so constant effort will sap our mental vigour, while a short period of rest and relaxation will restore our powers. Unremitting effort leads to a kind of mental dullness and lethargy.

It takes a constant effort of mind to avoid the abundance that life offers naturally.

As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.

To an active mind, indolence is more painful than labor.

When your mind is focused and made up you don't make excuses. You try. If you fail you try again.

Say, Britain, could you ever boast, Three poets in an age at most? Our chilling climate hardly bears A sprig of bays in fifty years.

Oh well, perhaps when you're my age you'll know the heart is an untrustworthy beast.The mind too,but it doesn't talk about love.

Even if your body doesn't work the way it used to, the heart and the mind and the spirit are not diminished.

LOOK back on time with kindly eyes, He doubtless did his best; How softly sinks his trembling sun In human nature's west!

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.

When I stand in a library where is all the recorded wit of the world, but none of the recording, a mere accumulated, and not trulycumulative treasure; where immortal works stand side by side with anthologies which did not survive their month, and cobweb and mildew have already spread from these to the binding of those; and happily I am reminded of what poetry is,--I perceive that Shakespeare and Milton did not foresee into what company they were to fall. Alas! that so soon the work of a true poet should be swept into such a dust-hole!

Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet.

It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose.

If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.

True originality has its foundations in the soul, not in the mind, and when there is an effort to create something different it is usually a failure. Beethoven or Schumann or Chopin did not try to be original. They were original.

Product of a myriad various minds and contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists.