Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil. — George Santayana Copy Share
To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language. — George Santayana Copy Share
“The contemporary world has turned its back on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably.” — George Santayana Copy Share
The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things… — George Santayana Copy Share
Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival; they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being… — George Santayana Copy Share
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth. — George Santayana Copy Share
Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had… — George Santayana Copy Share
Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a… — George Santayana Copy Share
Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood. — George Santayana Copy Share
Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others,… — George Santayana Copy Share
