Frases de George Santayana

página 3

“O fanatismo consiste em redobrar o próprio esforço quando nos esquecemos do objetivo.”

“Há três tipos de governo: o que faz acontecer, o que assiste acontecer e o que nem sabe o que acontece.”

“A sociedade é como o ar: necessário para respirar, mas insuficiente para dele se viver.”

“O paraíso é estar em paz com as coisas.”

“Caos é o nome de qualquer ordem que produz confusão nas nossas mentes.”

“Não há cura para o nascimento e a morte, a não ser usufruir o intervalo.”

“Não podemos escolher como vamos morrer. Não há cura para o nascimento e para a morte, a não ser usufruir o intervalo.”

“A mulher mais solitária do mundo é aquela sem nenhuma amiga.”

“O mundo é uma caricatura perpétua de si mesmo; e a cada momento ele é a derrisão e a contradição do que pretende ser.”

“Amigos são geralmente do mesmo sexo, porque quando um homem e uma mulher concordam é apenas nas suas conclusões; as razões são sempre diferentes.”

“A teoria ajuda-nos a suportar a nossa ignorância dos fatos.”

“Para uma idéia é de péssimo agouro estar na moda, pois isso significa que em seguida se tornará antiquada para sempre.”

“Os acidentes são acidentes apenas para os ingênuos.”

“O amor é muito mais exigente do que ele próprio supõe: nove décimos do amor estão no enamoramento, um décimo na substância amor.”

“O que os outros pensam de nós teria pouca importância se não influenciasse tão profundamente o que pensamos de nós mesmos quando tomamos conhecimento da opinião alheia.”

“O moço que não chorou é um selvagem, e o velho que não quer rir é um tolo.”

“Eu acredito em geral em um dualismo entre fatos e as ideias destes fatos nas mentes humanas.”

“A vida não é um espetáculo nem uma festa; é um transe.”

“Quem não sabe recordar o passado está condenado a perigosas repetições.”

“O fanatismo consiste em intensificar os nossos esforços depois de termos esquecido o nosso alvo.”

“Nosso caráter é um presságio de nosso destino, e quanto maior a integridade que temos e mantemos, mais fácil e nobre este destino tem probabilidade de ser.”

“Dar valor à felicidade doméstica leva tempo. Espíritos voláteis preferem a infelicidade.”

“Sanidade é a loucura colocada em bom uso.”

“Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.”

“At midday the daily food of all Spaniards was the puchero or cocido, as the dish is really called which the foreigners call pot-pourri or olla podrida. This contains principally yellow chick-peas, with a little bacon, some potatoes or other vegetables and normally also small pieces of beef or sausage, all boiled in one pot at a very slow fire; the liquid of the same makes the substantial broth that is served first.”

“I leave you but the sound of many a word
In mocking echoes haply overheard,
I sang to heaven. My exile made me free,
from world to world, from all worlds carried me.”

“The mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a truth.”

“But what a perfection of rottenness in a philosophy!”

“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.”

“They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life.”

“Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.”

“Prosperity, both for individuals and for states, means possessions; and possessions mean burdens and harness and slavery; and slavery for the mind, too, because it is not only the rich man's time that is pre-empted, but his affections, his judgement, and the range of his thoughts.”

“The highest form of vanity is love of fame.”

“To know how just a cause we have for grieving is already a consolation.”

“Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.”

“American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.”

“I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.”

“The living have never shown me how to live.”

“O world, thou choosest not the better part!
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart,
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul’s invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.”

“Most men’s conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.”

“It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.”

“Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble, it must remain rare, if common, it must become mean.”

“Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.”

“Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole world is doing things.”

“In America literary reputations come and go so swiftly," I complained, fatuously. [Santayana's] answer was swift. "It would be insufferable if they did not.”

“Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.”

“Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.”

“There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.”

“Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.”

“Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.”

“Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.”

“Religions are not true or false, but better or worse.”