574 Quotes by George Santayana

To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.

The worship of power is an old religion.

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.

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

Consciousness is a born hermit.

The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,She makes a sweeter music than is heard.

I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life; I should not be honest otherwise.

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