Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch;… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals… — 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
