The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like? — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely a vehicle for joy. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
“I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life; I should not be honest otherwise.” — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Music is essentially useless, as life is; but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine… If we dramatize its life and conceive… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of its content. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
“Those were the two prerequisites, in my conception, to perfect friendship: capacity to worship and capacity to laugh. Modern life is not… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world; and when not too much… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea.… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
“What ought to be imperfect in time is, because of its very imperfection there, perfect when viewed under the form of eternity.… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo, The Last Puritan,… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
“Now the zest of romanticism consists in taking what you know is an independent and ancient world as if it were material… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
“Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling, at once faithful, discrete, and superlative. Living things in contact with the air… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experience. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions. — 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