G Santayana Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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