George Santayana Quotes

343 Sourced Quotes

With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

George Santayana
It is a pleasant surprise to him [the mathematician], and an added problem, if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them; much as if a composer found that the sailors could have better when singing his songs.

George Santayana
In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.

George Santayana
There are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered.

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
Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.

George Santayana
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

George Santayana
The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.

George Santayana
When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.

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

George Santayana
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

George Santayana
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.

George Santayana
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

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

George Santayana
Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.

George Santayana
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.

George Santayana
Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.

George Santayana
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

George Santayana
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

George Santayana
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.

George Santayana
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.

George Santayana
Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.

George Santayana
The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.

George Santayana
Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.

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

George Santayana
The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.

George Santayana
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

George Santayana
Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.

George Santayana
To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.

George Santayana