George Santayana Quotes on Literature
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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 in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life.
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Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
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The Bible is literature, not dogma.
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'In America literary reputations come and go so swiftly,' I complained, fatuously. [Santayana's] answer was swift. 'It would be insufferable if they did not.'