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 theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Work and love these are the basics; waking life is a dream controlled. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Spirit itself is not human; it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong,… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall… — 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
