A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.
George SantayanaLogic, like language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of symbolizing and harnessing in expression the existing diversities of things; and whilst some languages, given a man's constitution and habits, may seem more beautiful and convenient to him than others, it is a foolish heat in a patriot to insist that only his native language is intelligible or right.
George SantayanaFor an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
George SantayanaWhen all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.
George SantayanaUselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.
George SantayanaThe working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.
George SantayanaThe profoundest affinities are those most readily felt, and though a thousand later considerations may overlay and override them, they remain a background and standard for all happiness. If we trace them out we succeed.
George SantayanaA buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world; and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.
George SantayanaWhat is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like?
George SantayanaTo be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and aesthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so.
George SantayanaThe sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a vehicle for things.
George SantayanaReligion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life.
George SantayanaThe theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
George SantayanaThe theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.
George SantayanaIf artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.
George SantayanaBeauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
George SantayanaThe combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.
George SantayanaThere is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made us ashamed of ourselves when it was happening: there is a pleasant panoramic sense of what it all was and how it all had to be. Why, if we are not vain or snobbish, need we desire that it should have been different? The better things we missed may yet be enjoyed or attained by someone else somewhere: why isn't that just as good? And there is no regret, either, in the sense of wishing the past to return, or missing it: it is quite real enough as it is, there at its own date and place.
George SantayanaThe more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
George SantayanaThe human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
George SantayanaA musical education is necessary for musical judgement. What most people relish is hardly music; it is rather a drowsy reverie relieved by nervous thrills.
George SantayanaIn unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.
George SantayanaSociety itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.
George SantayanaChristianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedism, extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like Buddhism, it had looked only for peace and the liberation of souls. It looked beyond; it dreamt of infinite blisses and crowns it should be crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God... Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with anesthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire.
George SantayanaNature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.
George SantayanaThe truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
George SantayanaBy nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
George Santayana