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George Santayana

George Santayana Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous George Santayana Quotes

“O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies; To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art.”

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Book:The complete poems of George Santayana: a critical edition
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“Christianity 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.”

IfsWorldShouldHas BeensWarSoulReligionUniverseChristianityFireImpossibleBuddhismMoralityQuietAmbitionHatredSickInfiniteTyrannyLiberationBlissCrownsBurnedScentHeresyFuriousPersecutedHoundsExterminationAnestheticsSick World
Author:George Santayana
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“Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.”

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Book:Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
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“... even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not; and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.”

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Book:The Works of George Santayana
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“The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.”

HumansArtSoulLife IsPassionJusticeRaceIndustryIntellectualUniversalInfiniteMethodWorkersIntuitionQueensHuman RaceOrganizedFeminineDedicatedHumankindBeesPassiveInsectsMasculineSexuallyFertileBroodingIntellectual Life
Book:Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
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“Man alone knows that he must die; but that very knowledge raises him, in a sense, above mortality, by making him a sharer in the vision of eternal truth. He becomes the spectator of his own tragedy; he sympathizes so much with the fury of the storm that he has no ears left for the shipwrecked sailor, though the sailor were his own soul. The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.”

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Author:George Santayana
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“Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually towards another, makes it one of the dearest employments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solicitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty?”

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Book:The Sense of Beauty
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“A 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.”

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Book:The Works of George Santayana: Soliloquies in England and Later soliloquies
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