574 Quotes by George Santayana

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.

A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.

Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.

Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.

A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.

A country without a memory is a country of madmen.

Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.