574 Quotes by George Santayana

What is the part of wisdom? To dream with one eye open; to be detatched from the world without being hostile to it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings, without forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

To the uninitiated they have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave of the hand: What! are you still troubled by that? Or if compelled to be so scholastic as to labour the point they have explained, as usual, that oneself cannot be the absolute because the idea of oneself, to arise, must be contrasted with other ideas. Therefore, you cannot well have the idea of a world in which nothing appears but the idea of yourself.

Man’s most serious activity is play.

Guard you thoughts as you would your wallet. Habit is stronger than reason.

The ultimate intuitions on which ethics rests are not debatable, for they are not opinions we hazard but preferences we feel; and it can neither be correct nor incorrect that we feel them.

The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man’s good is found in another’s evil.

Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one’s fine feelings, on one’s indomitable optimism and trust in life.

The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men’s minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.