Quotes from George Santayana

If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.

The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.

Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.

The earth has its music for those who will listen.

By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.

Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.

The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.

The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.

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

It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.

Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.

Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.

Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.

Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?

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