574 Quotes by George Santayana

Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.

I have no axe to grind; only my thoughts to burnish.

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

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken with to themselves.

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

Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely a vehicle for joy.

The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.