Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabline it to make its peace with its destiny.
George Santayana Quotations
We found 67 matching quotations.
Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.
Friendship is constant in all other things Save in the office and affairs of love.
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.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.
Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, not condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
A child only educated at school is an uneducated child.
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.
The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
Happiness is the only sanction of life where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
Culture is on the horns of this dilemma if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Sanity is a madness put to good use.
The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things: and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is.
To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another people are friends in spots.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument its function is to make the worse appear the better.
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval
It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.
Society is like the air; necessary to breathe, but insufficient to live on.
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
... everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
Love is only half the illusion the lover, but not his love, is deceived.
America is a young country with an old mentality.
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Thse who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.
A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
The young man who has not wept is a savage,
and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
Music is essentially useless, as life is.