Quote

Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.

George Santayana

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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
Religion
Fulfilling
Every
Necessarily
Life
Dear
Function
Necessary
Sanctifies
Whose
Contradicts
Probably
Sanctify
Society
Adopted

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People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
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It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.
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One real world is enough.
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What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?
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The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.
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America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
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An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
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The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
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It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.
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That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
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The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
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Spirit itself is not human it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?
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Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.
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It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.
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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.
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For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
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To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana
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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.
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The arts must study their occasions they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.
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... even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.
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