Best Santayana Quotes & Sayings

The truth properly means the sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities andrelations which the world has exemplified or will exemplify. The truth is all things seen under the form of eternity. — 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

It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases. — George Santayana

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

Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age. — George Santayana

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine. — 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

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end. — George Santayana

Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life. — George Santayana

It is the acme of life to understand life. — George Santayana

The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence. — George Santayana

Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men. — George Santayana

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

Wisdom comes by disillusionment. — George Santayana

You and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams. — George Santayana

The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history. — George Santayana

Fear first created the gods. — George Santayana

An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there. — George Santayana

When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains. — George Santayana

We do right enough darling, if we go wrong together. — George Santayana

He described what he knew best or had heard most, and felt he had described the universe. (on Hegel) — George Santayana

The profoundest affinities are the most readily felt; they remain a background and standard for all happiness and if we trace them out we succeed. — George Santayana

All conditions are bearable, all dignities trumpery, and wisdom simply the gift of making the best of whatever is thrust upon us. — George Santayana

We gain the insight to see ourselves through the friendships we make. They mirror us to ourselves. In them we see clearly what we do not have as well as what the world cannot do without. They do not judge us or condemn us or reject us. They hold us up while we grow, laughing and playing as we go. They bring us to the best of ourselves. "One's friends," George Santayana wrote, "are that part of the human race with which one can be human. — Joan D. Chittister

Heir imaginativeba ckground. Every philosopher, in addition to the formal system which heoffers to the world, has another, much simpler, of which he may be quite unaware. If he is aware of it,he probably realizes that it won't quite do; he therefore conceals it, and sets forth something more sophisticated, which he believes because it is like his crude system, but which he asks others to
accept because he thinks he has made it such as cannot be disproved. The sophistication comes in
by way of refutation of refutations, but this alone will never give a positive result: it shows,at
best, that a theory maybe true, not that it must be. The positive result, however little the
philosopher may realize it, is due to his imaginative preconceptions,or to what Santayana calls
animal faith. — Bertrand Russell

The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words. — George Santayana

It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity ... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods. — George Santayana

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive. — George Santayana

Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world. — George Santayana

At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself, or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat. — George Santayana

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination. — George Santayana

Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it. — George Santayana

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what. — George Santayana

A habitual indulgence in the inarticulate is a sure sign of the philosopher who has not learned to think, the poet who has not learned to write, the painter who has not learned to paint, and the impression that has not learned to express itself
all of which are compatible with an immensity of genius in the inexpressible soul. — George Santayana

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman. — George Santayana

In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else — George Santayana

Fanaticism is redoubling your effort after you've forgotten your aim. — 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

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

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be. — George Santayana

The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it. — George Santayana

Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view; as to knowing her through and through; that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains. — George Santayana

We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere. — George Santayana

The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit. — George Santayana

Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment. — George Santayana

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity. — George Santayana

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he. — George Santayana

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted. — George Santayana

The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice. — George Santayana

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists. — George Santayana

The world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes. — George Santayana