Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
It would be hard to conceive a system of instincts more nicely adjusted, where the constituents should represent or support one another… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers… — 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 Image
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 Image
“The contemporary world has turned its back on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably.” — George Santayana Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
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 Image
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
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 Image
