574 Quotes by George Santayana

Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable, precisely, the balance and wisdom that come from long perspectives and broad foundations.

The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don’t understand it.

What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word – the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.

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 .

A man’s feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

The degree in which a poet’s imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man’s wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility.

Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm’s length.

Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom – picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode – may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair.