Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and… — 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
Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom - picturesque, passionate, unhappy… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They all may collapse altogether. — 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
Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a… — 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
At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself, or at most a few voluntary… — 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
Logic, like language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of symbolizing and harnessing in expression the existing diversities of… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
By "essence" I understand a universal, of any degree of complexity and definition, which may be given immediately, whether to sense or… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
An operation that eventually kills may be technically successful, and the man may die cured; and so a description of religion thatshowed… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
There is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made us… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common… — 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
