George Santayana Quotes

The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.

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.

The ultimate intuitions on which ethics rests are not debatable, for they are not opinions we hazard but preferences we feel; and it can neither be correct nor incorrect that we feel them.

The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend, because he has not imagination enough to sympathize with their proper needs nor humility enough to respect them as if they were his own. Arrogance, fanaticism, meddlesomeness, and imperialism may then masquerade as philanthropy.

Science is the response to the demand for information, and in it we ask for the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.

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.

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

A picture you hold long enough in your head becomes your reality..

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.

To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together.

Although a poem be not made by counting of syllables upon the fingers, yet "numbers" is the most poetical synonym we have for verse, and "measure" the most significant equivalent for beauty, for goodness, and perhaps even for truth. Those early and profound philosophers, the followers of Pythagoras, saw the essence of all things in number, and it was by weight, measure, and number, as we read in the Bible, that the Creator first brought Nature out of the void.

All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.

All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.

ولكن يندر أن يوجد الرجل أو العصر الذى ينتقى طريقه بمفرده ، بل يقتصر اختيارنا على العموم على واحد من اثنين : فإما أن نسبق غيرنا في الطريق الذي تم اختياره لنا فعلاً ، وإما أن نقف فى الطريق فنسده أمامهم . وما يمكننا أن نقوم به من إصلاح لا يتعدى عادة الإصلاح الداخلي الذي يتم في حدود معينة ، ويكون نتيجة دراسة الأشكال التقليدية دراسة أكثر عمقاً