George Santayana Quotes on Philosophy
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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.
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There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.
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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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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.
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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.
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That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
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It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.
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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.
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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.
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Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
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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.
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Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.
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Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
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Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
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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.
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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.
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Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
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Philosophers are as jealous as women. Each wants a monopoly of praise.
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Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
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Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
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Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
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Gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
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Love makes us poets and the approach of death makes us philosophers.
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Only the dead have seen an end to war. (Incorrectly attributed to Plato by General Douglas MacArthur)
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Religions are not true or false, but better or worse.
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The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.