574 Quotes by George Santayana

The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.

There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.

If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.

What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art .

Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.

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

We do right enough darling, if we go wrong together.

My soul hates the fool whose only passion is to live by rule.

...so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being known how to touch it. That being is not selected but recognized and obeyed.