George Santayana
Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.Collection: Echoes
The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.Collection: Clouds
Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.Collection: Enemy
Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.Collection: Men
Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.Collection: Philosophy
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.Collection: Adventure
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.Collection: Book
The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.Collection: Ignorance
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.Collection: Love
My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.Collection: Character
If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.Collection: Art
In this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express; the choice lies between a mask and a figleaf.Collection: Lying
The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.Collection: Horse
Art is a delayed echo.Collection: Art
Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.Collection: Pleasure
Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.Collection: Philosophy
Philosophers are as jealous as women; each wants a monopoly of praise.Collection: Philosophy
Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.Collection: Lovely
Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.Collection: Art
Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.Collection: Fighting
For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.Collection: Choices
The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.Collection: Art
An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.Collection: Artist
Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival; they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, "Please strike here!Collection: Hands
Columbus gave the world another world.Collection: World
All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.Collection: Life
I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, un-travelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion.Collection: Art
Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything.Collection: Chaos
To drink in the spirit of a place you should be not only alone but unhurried.Collection: Drinking
One real world is enough.Collection: Real
To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful.Collection: Beauty
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.Collection: Impossible
Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.Collection: Ideas
Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.Collection: Hate
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.Collection: Writing History
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.Collection: Humor
The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything.Collection: Education
Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.Collection: Progress
In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.Collection: Justice
Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.Collection: Men
Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.Collection: War
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. ...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion.Collection: Kings
Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.Collection: Inspirational
Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.Collection: Function
It is true that I am carrying out various methods of treatment recommended by doctors and dentists in the hope of dying in the remote future in perfect health.Collection: Doctors
The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.Collection: Life
The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panza's who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixote's with a sense for ideals, but mad.Collection: Reality
Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them.Collection: Character
Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals, whereas with us the intervals are all.Collection: Peace