Past Quotes by George Santayana

Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.

— George Santayana

The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.

— George Santayana

Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.

— George Santayana

To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.

— George Santayana

“The contemporary world has turned its back on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably.”

— George Santayana

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

If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.

— George Santayana

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

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

— George Santayana

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

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

— George Santayana

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

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

— George Santayana

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

Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.

— George Santayana