26 George Santayana Quotes on Philosophy

George Santayana quotes on philosophy

3. American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.

5. There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.

6. 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.

7. 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, from all worlds carried me.

10. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.

13. That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

19. It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

21. What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.

22. The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.

24. Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

26. When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind...They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country.

27. Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.

28. Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

29. Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

32. The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

34. I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.

38. Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.

41. Philosophers are as jealous as women. Each wants a monopoly of praise.

42. Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

45. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

50. Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.

51. Gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.

54. Love makes us poets and the approach of death makes us philosophers.

57. Only the dead have seen an end to war. (Incorrectly attributed to Plato by General Douglas MacArthur)

58. Religions are not true or false, but better or worse.

65. The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.