The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
“Time and Space are not prior to creation, they are forms under which creation becomes thinkable.” — 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
Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it… — 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
Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The… — 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
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — 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
Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction… — 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
“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
Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
It is true that I am carrying out various methods of treatment recommended by doctors and dentists in the hope of dying… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering… — 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
