Quotes from George Santayana

It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.

Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.

There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.

To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of its content.

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

A simple life is its own reward.

The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.

Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.

All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.

It is the acme of life to understand life.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act wisely.

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.

Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.

What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like?

The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.

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?

The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.