George Santayana Quotations

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine then out of a prig

Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.

Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.

Docility is the observable half of reason.

Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.

You and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams.

Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.

To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.

The 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.

Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.