George Santayana Quotes
Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.
Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.
To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.
A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.
Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.
Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.
For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.
It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.
It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility
A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.
When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.
To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.
A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.
Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.
Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.
To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.
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.
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.
The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.
If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.
Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?
The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
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.
All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death.
Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.
It is true that I am carrying out various methods of treatment recommended by doctors and dentists in the hope of dying in the remote future in perfect health.
Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.
What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like?
Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.
Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.
To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and aesthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so.
I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free, from world to world, from all worlds carried me.
