George Santayana Quotes

343 Sourced Quotes

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
To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.

George Santayana
A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.

George Santayana
What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.

George Santayana
The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Santayana
Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.

George Santayana
The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.

George Santayana
In fact, 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
Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.

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

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
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.

George Santayana
[Everything] ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development.

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

George Santayana
To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.

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

George Santayana
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

George Santayana