574 Quotes by George Santayana

A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world; and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.

The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.

Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of them that has grown into a jealous passion.

Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.

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

To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and aesthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so.