Quote

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

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
Speak
Much
Accident
Men
Accidents
Historical
Shall
Quite
Religion
Language

More quotes by George Santayana

Image
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument, its function is to make the worse appear the better article. A confused competition of all propagandas -- those insults to human nature -- is carried on by the most expert psychological methods -- for instance, by always repeating a lie.
George Santayana
Image
... 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.
George Santayana
Image
A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.
George Santayana
Image
The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.
George Santayana
Image
The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.
George Santayana
Image
The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.
George Santayana
Image
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
George Santayana
Image
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
George Santayana
Image
The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
George Santayana
Image
The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive
George Santayana
Image
When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.
George Santayana
Image
Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
George Santayana
Image
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
George Santayana
Image
To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation to elude oneself is the romantic.
George Santayana
Image
Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
George Santayana
Image
One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.
George Santayana
Image
We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.
George Santayana
Image
It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.
George Santayana
Image
We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
George Santayana
Image
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.
George Santayana