George Santayana Quotes

The worship of power is an old religion. ~ George Santayana

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them. ~ George Santayana

There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty. ~ George Santayana

Criticism surprises the soul in the arms of convention. ~ George Santayana

If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation. ~ George Santayana

We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere. ~ George Santayana

There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far. ~ George Santayana

The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it. ~ George Santayana

Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of them that has grown into a jealous passion. ~ George Santayana

Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light. ~ George Santayana

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity. ~ George Santayana

People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them. ~ George Santayana

The body must be loosely clad if the mind is to forget it and impetuously lead its own life. ~ George Santayana

The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact. ~ George Santayana

Consciousness is a born hermit. ~ George Santayana

In this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express; the choice lies between a mask and a figleaf. ~ George Santayana

Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention. ~ George Santayana

The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit. ~ George Santayana

To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions. ~ George Santayana

Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any. ~ George Santayana

The difficulty, after having the experience to symbolize, lies only in having enough imagination to suspend it in a thought; and further to give this thought such verbal expression that others may be able to decipher it, and to be stirred by it as by a wind of suggestion sweeping the whole forest of their memories. ~ George Santayana

Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends. ~ George Santayana

A fanatical imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel. ~ George Santayana

It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity ... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods. ~ George Santayana

Music is essentially useless, as life is. ~ George Santayana

It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours. ~ George Santayana

Sanity is madness put to good use. ~ George Santayana

The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey. ~ George Santayana

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what. ~ George Santayana

All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death. ~ George Santayana

At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself, or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat. ~ George Santayana

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication. ~ George Santayana

Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable, precisely, the balance and wisdom that come from long perspectives and broad foundations ~ George Santayana

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character. ~ George Santayana

Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace. ~ George Santayana

The highest form of vanity is love of fame. ~ George Santayana

The unforgivable sin is the refusal to pardon. ~ George Santayana

The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form. ~ George Santayana

The wisest man has something yet to learn. ~ George Santayana

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason. ~ George Santayana

Columbus found a world, and had no chart save one that Faith deciphered in the skies. ~ George Santayana

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. ~ George Santayana

Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice. ~ George Santayana

It is a great bond to dislike the same things. ~ George Santayana

There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable. ~ George Santayana

I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness. ~ George Santayana

If clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary matters. ~ George Santayana

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas. ~ George Santayana

I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life; I should not be honest otherwise. ~ George Santayana

Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt. ~ George Santayana

Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked. ~ George Santayana

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world. ~ George Santayana

Since the days of Descartes it has been a conception familiar to philosophers that every visible event in nature might be explained by previous visible events, and that all the motions, for instance, of the tongue in speech, or of the hand in painting, might have merely physical causes. If consciousness is thus accessory to life and not essential to it, the race of man might have existed upon the earth and acquired all the arts necessary for its subsistence without possessing a single sensation, idea, or emotion. Natural selection might have secured the survival of those automata which made useful reactions upon their environment. An instinct would have been developed, dangers would have been shunned without being feared, and injuries avenged without being felt. ~ George Santayana

Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act wisely. ~ George Santayana

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence. ~ George Santayana

Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel. ~ George Santayana

Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself. ~ George Santayana

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood. ~ George Santayana

It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger. ~ George Santayana

I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism. ~ George Santayana

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love. ~ George Santayana

Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life. ~ George Santayana

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality. ~ George Santayana

There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself. ~ George Santayana

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books. ~ George Santayana

Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification. ~ George Santayana

In the passion of love, for instance, a cause unknown to the
sufferer, but which is doubtless the spring-flood of hereditary
instincts accidentally let loose, suddenly checks the young
man's gayety, dispels his random curiosity, arrests perhaps his very breath; and when he looks for a cause to explain his
suspended faculties, he can find it only in the presence or image of another being, of whose character, possibly, he knows nothing and whose beauty may not be remarkable; yet
that image pursues him everywhere, and he is dominated by
an unaccustomed tragic earnestness and a new capacity for
suffering and joy.
If the passion be strong there is no previous interest or duty that
will be remembered before it; if it be lasting the whole life may
be reorganized by it, it may impose new habits, other manners,
and another religion.
Yet what is the root of all this idealism? An irrational instinct,
normally intermittent, such as all dumb creatures share, which
has here managed to dominate a human soul and to enlist all the
mental powers in its more or less permanent service, upsetting
their usual equilibrium.
This madness, however, inspires method; and for the first time,
perhaps, in his life, the man has something to live for. ~ George Santayana

The truth properly means the sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities andrelations which the world has exemplified or will exemplify. The truth is all things seen under the form of eternity. ~ George Santayana

Fanaticism is redoubling your effort after you've forgotten your aim. ~ George Santayana

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles. ~ George Santayana

In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also. ~ George Santayana

Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length. ~ George Santayana

A simple life is its own reward. ~ George Santayana

By obedience and self-control come to your full stature; be in fact what you are in possibility; satisfy ~ George Santayana

There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves. ~ George Santayana

When we feel the poetic thrill, is it not that we find sweep in the concise and depth in the clear, as we might find all the lights of the sea in the water of a jewel? And what is a philosophic thought but such an epitome? ~ George Santayana

We gain the insight to see ourselves through the friendships we make. They mirror us to ourselves. In them we see clearly what we do not have as well as what the world cannot do without. They do not judge us or condemn us or reject us. They hold us up while we grow, laughing and playing as we go. They bring us to the best of ourselves. "One's friends," George Santayana wrote, "are that part of the human race with which one can be human. ~ Joan D. Chittister

Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts. ~ George Santayana

Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths. ~ George Santayana

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject. ~ George Santayana

By "essence" I understand a universal, of any degree of complexity and definition, which may be given immediately, whether to sense or to thought ... This object of pure sense or pure thought, with no belief superadded, an object inwardly complete and individual, but without external relations or physical status, is what I call an essence. ~ George Santayana

To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language. ~ George Santayana

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads. ~ George Santayana

An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity. ~ George Santayana

There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar and anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce stupidity. Such a headless people has the mind of a worm and the claws of a dragon. ~ George Santayana

In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour. ~ George Santayana

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation. ~ George Santayana

Wisdom comes by disillusionment. ~ George Santayana

Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things. ~ George Santayana

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained. ~ George Santayana

We are not compelled in naturalism, or even in materialism, to ignore immaterial things; the point is that any immaterial things which are recognized shall be regarded as names, aspects, functions, or concomitant products of those physical things among which action goes on. ~ George Santayana

The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred. ~ George Santayana

The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it. ~ George Santayana

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. ~ George Santayana

Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center. ~ George Santayana

The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape. ~ George Santayana

Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies. ~ George Santayana

Docility is the observable half of reason. ~ George Santayana

Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence. ~ George Santayana

In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else ~ George Santayana