Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.
George SantayanaAn operation that eventually kills may be technically successful, and the man may die cured; and so a description of religion thatshowed it to be madness might first show how real and warm it was, so that if it perished, at least it would perish understood.
George SantayanaOne of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.
George SantayanaImagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center.
George SantayanaThe vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
George SantayanaReligion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.
George SantayanaOld age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.
George SantayanaFor Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
George Santayana. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.
George SantayanaIt is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.
George SantayanaThe Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.
George SantayanaTo knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
George SantayanaDo not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
George SantayanaNature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view; as to knowing her through and through; that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
George SantayanaNever have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo, The Last Puritan, and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age, I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure, more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.
George SantayanaNietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.
George SantayanaTruth is a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.
George SantayanaWords are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.
George SantayanaThere is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
George SantayanaTyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
George SantayanaNothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
George SantayanaTo fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.
George SantayanaGraphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
George SantayanaIt is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.
George SantayanaThe body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
George SantayanaThe scientific value of truth is not, however, ultimate or absolute. It rests partly on practical, partly on aesthetic interests. As our ideas are gradually brought into conformity with the facts by the painful process of selection,-for intuition runs equally into truth and into error, and can settle nothing if not controlled by experience,-we gain vastly in our command over our environment. This is the fundamental value of natural science
George SantayanaThe tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
George SantayanaHe thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
George Santayana