Quotes from George Santayana

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.

To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.

Fear first created the gods.

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

For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.

Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.

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.

My atheism like that of Spinoza is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.

Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine That lights the pathway but one step ahead Across a void of mystery and dread.

If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.