574 Quotes by George Santayana

Habit is stronger than reason.

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.

Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.

Music is essentially useless, as life is; but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually towards another, makes it one of the dearest employments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solicitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty?

It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free, from world to world, from all worlds carried me.

. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.