Quote

Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.

George Santayana

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

George Santayana
Age: 88 †
Born: 1863
Born: October 2
Died: 1952
Died: September 16
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Madrid
Spain
Jorge Santayana
Jorge Augustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana
Jorge Augustin Nicolas Ruiz de Santayana
George Santayana
Fairy
Tales
Conscience
Religion
Great
Religions

More quotes by George Santayana

Image
To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.
George Santayana
Image
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
George Santayana
Image
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
George Santayana
Image
The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.
George Santayana
Image
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
George Santayana
Image
Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
George Santayana
Image
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
George Santayana
Image
Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
George Santayana
Image
The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.
George Santayana
Image
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
George Santayana
Image
Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
George Santayana
Image
People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
George Santayana
Image
Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.
George Santayana
Image
We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.
George Santayana
Image
There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.
George Santayana
Image
Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
George Santayana
Image
It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.
George Santayana
Image
We are not compelled in naturalism, or even in materialism, to ignore immaterial things the point is that any immaterial things which are recognized shall be regarded as names, aspects, functions, or concomitant products of those physical things among which action goes on.
George Santayana
Image
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.
George Santayana
Image
In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
George Santayana