574 Quotes by George Santayana

Wealth, religion and military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

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.

With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.

why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.

The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them

Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence

It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.

Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.