George Santayana - Natural Quotes

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The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.

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
Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.

George Santayana
Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.

George Santayana
Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.

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

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

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

George Santayana
Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.

George Santayana