Men have fiendishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell only to find it ridiculous. (George Santayana)
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)
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy. (George Santayana)
Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny. (George Santayana)
To fight is a radical instinct if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions (George Santayana)
The empiricist... thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing. (George Santayana)
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different. (George Santayana)
The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk. (George Santayana)
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts. (George Santayana)
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal. (George Santayana)
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character. (George Santayana)
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator. (George Santayana)
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer. (George Santayana)
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)
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