George Santayana Quotes

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Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.

George Santayana
The scientific value of truth is not, however, ultimate or absolute. It rests partly on practical, partly on aesthetic interests. As our ideas are gradually brought into conformity with the facts by the painful process of selection,-for intuition runs equally into truth and into error, and can settle nothing if not controlled by experience,-we gain vastly in our command over our environment. This is the fundamental value of natural science

George Santayana
Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.

George Santayana
It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.

George Santayana
Our dignity is not in what we do but what we understand. The whole world is doing things.

George Santayana
Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.

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
A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

George Santayana
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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