George Santayana Quotes

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

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

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

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

George Santayana
Even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not; and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.

George Santayana
Science, then is the alternative consideration of common experience; it is common knowledge extended and refined.

George Santayana
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.

George Santayana
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

George Santayana
Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.

George Santayana
For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.

George Santayana
There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.

George Santayana
Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life.

George Santayana
Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Awe very properly hangs about it, since it is the immovable standard and silent witness of all our memories and assertions; and the past and the future, which in our anxious life are so differently interesting and so differently dark, are one seamless garment for the truth, shining like the sun.

George Santayana
The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.

George Santayana
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across a void of mystery and dread.

George Santayana
The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.

George Santayana
It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.

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
Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.

George Santayana
Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home.

George Santayana
The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.

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

George Santayana
Spirit itself is not human; it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?

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
Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.

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

George Santayana