7 George Santayana Quotes on Truth

George Santayana quotes on truth

25. History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not what science necessarily rest on. In order to sift evidence we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.

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.

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

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

60. Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.

61. Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

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