George Santayana Quotes

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

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors.

Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling, at once faithful, discrete, and superlative. Living things in contact with the air must acquire a cuticle, and it is not urged against cuticles that they are not hearts; yet some philosophers seem to be angry with images for not being things, and with words for not being feelings. Words and images are like shells, no less integral parts of nature than are the substances they cover, but better addressed to the eye and more open to observation. I would not say that substance exists for the sake of appearance, or faces for the sake of masks, or the passions for the sake of poetry and virtue. Nothing arises in nature for the sake of anything else; all these phases and products are involved equally in the round of existence.

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.

Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

[The empiricist] thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.

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.

I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, untravelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion.

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

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

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.