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
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
Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think… — George Santayana Affection Copy Share Image
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit. — George Santayana Fashion Copy Share Image
You and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his poor body and his… — George Santayana Body Copy Share Image
“Time and Space are not prior to creation, they are forms under which creation becomes thinkable.” — George Santayana Creation Copy Share Image
Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come. — George Santayana Compensation Copy Share Image
Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are… — George Santayana Imagination 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 Bubbles 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 Character Copy Share Image
The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially… — George Santayana Art Copy Share Image
“Wisdom lies in voluntary finitude and a timely change of heart: until maturity, multiplying the inclusions, up to the limit of natural… — George Santayana Change Copy Share Image
The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his… — George Santayana Art Copy Share Image
Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers… — George Santayana Cases Copy Share Image
One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of… — George Santayana Abandoned Copy Share Image
There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable. — George Santayana Existence Copy Share Image
Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public. — George Santayana Ancient Copy Share Image
The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums. — George Santayana Appalling 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 Affected Copy Share Image
“The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the… — George Santayana Idealism Copy Share Image
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions. — George Santayana Aging Copy Share Image
Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy. — George Santayana Argument Copy Share Image
In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that. — George Santayana Beautiful 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 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
The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred. — George Santayana Absent Copy Share Image
The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder. — George Santayana Battle Copy Share Image
The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies. — George Santayana Antipathy Copy Share Image
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity. — George Santayana Creativity Copy Share Image
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them. — George Santayana Conclusions Copy Share Image
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better. — George Santayana Advertising Copy Share Image
Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we… — George Santayana Beauty 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 Animal Copy Share Image
As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends. — George Santayana Friendship Copy Share Image
Great is this organism of mud and fire, terrible this vast, painful, glorious experiment — George Santayana Biology Copy Share Image
I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made… — George Santayana Echoes Copy Share Image
“We laughed at the same things, and we liked the same things. What more is needed for agreeable society?” — George Santayana Agreeable Copy Share Image
