The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy… — 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
What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word--the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Nothing you can lose by dying is half as precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavour to understand him. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with… — 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
