Quotes by George Santayana
The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.
All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
