George Santayana citáty

strana 2

„Přátelství je téměř vždy spojením části jedné mysli s částí jiné mysli; lidé jsou přátelé v určitých bodech.“

„Přátelé jsou ta část lidského rodu, se kterou člověk může být lidský.“

„Jen mrtví viděli konec války; jen mrtví vědí co to znamená žít.“

„Hudba je v podstatě stejně zbytečná jako lidský život.“

„Mladý muž, který nepláče, je barbar, a starý, který se nesměje, je blázen.“

„Člověk není stvořen k tomu, aby život chápal, ale aby jej žil.“

„Člověk je bytost s představivostí a morálkou proto, že ve společnosti dává svému životu nové cíle, které by o samotě nemohly existovat: přátelství, náboženství, umění, vědy.“

„Ten kdo zapomene na svoji minulost, je odsouzen ji znovu prožít.“

„Ti, kteří si nepamatují minulost, jsou odsouzeni k tomu, aby si ji zopakovali.“

„Pro člověka, který splnil svou povinnost, je smrt přirozená a vítaná právě tak jako spánek.“

„Proti narození a smrti nemáš léku. V mezidobí zachovej radost.“

„Fanatismus spočívá v tom, že člověk zdvojnásobí své úsilí když zapomněl svůj cíl.“

„Jste daleko šťastnější na duši, když sledujete roční období, než když jste beznadějně zamilováni do jara.“

„Je snazší udělat světce z volnomyšlenkáře než ze sprosťáka.“

„Je to velká výhoda pro filozofický systém – být v podstatě pravdivý.“

„Lidé, kteří se na tomto světě cítí jako ve vyhnanství, mocně inklinují k tomu, aby věřili, že jsou občany jiného světa.“

„Člověk musí být nohama zasazen ve své zemi, ale očima musí přehlížet svět.“

„Fanatik je ten, kdo zdvojnásobí své úsilí, když zapomněl své cíle.“

„Umělec navštěvuje muzeum. Pedant se tam odstěhuje.“

„Skepticismus je cudnost intelektu.“

„Obtížné je, co může být uděláno okamžitě, nemožné je, co trvá trochu déle.“

„Každá živá duše vítá všechno, s čím si ví rady; to ostatní ignoruje nebo popírá.“

„Bůh, k němuž hluboká filosofie lidskou mysl vrací, není tentýž, kterému ho mělká filosofie odcizila.“

„Opakování je jediná forma stálosti, jaké může příroda dosáhnout.“

„Zábava je dobrá věc, jen pokud nekazí něco lepšího.“

“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”

“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.”

“Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.”

“In proportion as a man's interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates and expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach the same impersonal level of ideas.”

“Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.”

“All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.”

“Although a poem be not made by counting of syllables upon the fingers, yet "numbers" is the most poetical synonym we have for verse, and "measure" the most significant equivalent for beauty, for goodness, and perhaps even for truth. Those early and profound philosophers, the followers of Pythagoras, saw the essence of all things in number, and it was by weight, measure, and number, as we read in the Bible, that the Creator first brought Nature out of the void.”

“Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor.”

“Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.”

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

“The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.”

“What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.”

“Santayana, indeed, is the Moses of the new naturalism, who discerned the promised land from afar but still wanders himself in the desert realms of being.”

“No doubt the spirit or energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves.”

“The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.”

“All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.”

“To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together.”

“England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors.”

“Liberalism has merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate interest may fight with every other for domination. Whoever is victorious in this struggle will make an end of liberalism; and the new order, which will deem itself saved, will have to defend itself in the following age against a new crop of rebels.”

“The soul, too, has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.”

“In solitude it is possible to love mankind; in the world, for one who knows the world, there can be nothing but secret or open war.”

“[The empiricist] thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.”

“Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.”

“When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.”

“The working of great administrations is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.”

“The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.”

“To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.”

“The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.”

“Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master.”