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George Santayana

  • shiraz bukharihas quoted4 months ago
    Santayana’s students, many of whom revered him, included such revolutionary modernists as T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens
  • shiraz bukharihas quoted4 months ago
    Like Plato and Nietzsche, the cosmopolitan Santayana belongs to that rare company of thinkers who bring an essentially literary sensibility to philosophical speculation.
  • shiraz bukharihas quoted4 months ago
    “a very great thought, perhaps the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon. . . . It is that all we observe about us, and ourselves also, may be so many passing forms of a permanent substance.”
  • shiraz bukharihas quoted4 months ago
    such quietism can only be approved “by a fatigued and disillusioned spirit,” and that death “must be hated and feared by every vigorous animal.

    Naturalism and materialism are not similar philosophies though both take the outside world as their starting point. Materialism with its insistence of no existence beyond apparent matter, considers material progress as the pinnacle of being and in that it sees death as an anomaly which should be overcome by controlling the elements. It is also ironic to note that materialists should love death since matter cannot be created or destroyed — it merely transforms— and hence their hate of death is unfounded. But their dialectics can't be seen behind the shut eyes of death.

    The dialectics can't allow a fully-satisfied end of life for the labors of one's life to him always remain hidden in their ultimate outcome.

  • shiraz bukharihas quoted4 months ago
    Despite his cavils, Santayana deeply admires Lucretius
  • shiraz bukharihas quoted4 months ago
    one iron law of change, runs through the whole, making all things kin in their inmost elements and in their last end. Here is the touch of nature indeed, her largeness and eternity.
  • shiraz bukharihas quoted4 months ago
    Only an inspired poet could be so subtle a moralist. Only a sound moralist could be so tragic a poet
  • shiraz bukharihas quoted4 months ago
    The worth of life lies in pursuit, not in attainment.”
  • shiraz bukharihas quoted4 months ago
    Never to be satisfied, is itself the salvation of man. . . .Only he deserves freedom and life who must daily win them afresh
  • shiraz bukharihas quoted4 months ago
    Indeed, the diversity of these three poets passes, if I may use the Hegelian dialect, into a unity of a higher kind. Each is typical of an age. Taken together they sum up all European philosophy.
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