George Santayana Quotes
Oliver realised for the first time that the primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk. General conversation bored him because he was naturally silent.
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.
The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
The living have never shown me how to live.
Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.
In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said..
Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.
Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility.
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.
Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
Our character...is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.