574 Quotes by George Santayana

The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.

It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on first, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the parts known give us evidence enough that the unknown parts cannot be much amiss.

The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger.

Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival; they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, "Please strike here!

It is the acme of life to understand life.

We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.

Order, for a liberal, means only peace; and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.