The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil. — George Santayana Combative Copy Share Image
It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers… — George Santayana Children Copy Share Image
Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility. — George Santayana Fancy Copy Share Image
...so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being known how to touch it. That being is not selected… — George Santayana Heart Copy Share Image
The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its… — George Santayana Beauty Copy Share Image
Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel. — George Santayana Dignity Copy Share Image
Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean. — George Santayana Common 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 Freedom Copy Share Image
To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women,… — George Santayana Dislike Copy Share Image
Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any… — George Santayana Anxiety Copy Share Image
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer; there… — George Santayana Chastity Copy Share Image
To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to… — George Santayana Beauty Copy Share Image
“Those were the two prerequisites, in my conception, to perfect friendship: capacity to worship and capacity to laugh. Modern life is not… — George Santayana Eternal friendship Copy Share Image
. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last… — George Santayana Actor 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 Mass Copy Share Image
If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch;… — George Santayana Contempt 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 Friends Copy Share Image
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills… — George Santayana Familiar 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… — George Santayana Ability Copy Share Image
The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about. — George Santayana Exercise Copy Share Image
Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost. — George Santayana Aroma Copy Share Image
The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,… — George Santayana Deeper 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 Art Copy Share Image
Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths. — George Santayana Arise Copy Share Image
Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble. — George Santayana Environment Copy Share Image
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world. — George Santayana Events Copy Share Image
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. — George Santayana Agree Copy Share Image
It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger. — George Santayana Depth Copy Share Image
Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center. — George Santayana Circumstances 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 Beauty 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 Common Copy Share Image
Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles. — George Santayana Boston Copy Share Image
Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired. — George Santayana Cease Copy Share Image
Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if… — George Santayana Arguing Copy Share Image
Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes,… — George Santayana Believe Copy Share Image
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace. — George Santayana Courage Copy Share Image
The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular. — George Santayana Belief Copy Share Image
A fanatical imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel. — George Santayana Cruel Copy Share Image
Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long… — George Santayana Action Copy Share Image
“The contemporary world has turned its back on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably.” — George Santayana Contemporary Copy Share Image
