George Santayana (1863-1952)

Quotes

• Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

• Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.

• A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

• Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things: and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is.

• That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

• The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.

• The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

• Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, not condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.

• The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

• Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.

• Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabline it to make its peace with its destiny.

• The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.

• Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

• There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval

• Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.

• America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.

• It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.

• Music is essentially useless, as life is.

• To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.

• Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.