Quote #2

In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; as when we hear that to him that hath shall be given and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Such characterizations appeal to our sense of fact. They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour. For we naturally seek to express his awful actuality, his unchallengeable power, no less than his holiness and his beauty.

More from George Santayana

  1. O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to …
  2. American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it i…
  3. All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left b…
  4. There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.
  5. They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live…
  6. I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free, from world to world, f…
  7. The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many…
  8. Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.

All George Santayana quotes