George Santayana Quotes

The contemporary world has turned its back on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably.

The body must be loosely clad if the mind is to forget it and impetuously lead its own life.

Since the days of Descartes it has been a conception familiar to philosophers that every visible event in nature might be explained by previous visible events, and that all the motions, for instance, of the tongue in speech, or of the hand in painting, might have merely physical causes. If consciousness is thus accessory to life and not essential to it, the race of man might have existed upon the earth and acquired all the arts necessary for its subsistence without possessing a single sensation, idea, or emotion. Natural selection might have secured the survival of those automata which made useful reactions upon their environment. An instinct would have been developed, dangers would have been shunned without being feared, and injuries avenged without being felt.

When we feel the poetic thrill, is it not that we find sweep in the concise and depth in the clear, as we might find all the lights of the sea in the water of a jewel? And what is a philosophic thought but such an epitome?

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.

To knock a thing down when it is cocked at an arrogant angle is a deep delight of the blood.

The difficulty, after having the experience to symbolize, lies only in having enough imagination to suspend it in a thought; and further to give this thought such verbal expression that others may be able to decipher it, and to be stirred by it as by a wind of suggestion sweeping the whole forest of their memories.

Time and Space are not prior to creation, they are forms under which creation becomes thinkable.

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

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy

Life is an art not to be learned by observation.

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.