"In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also."
Read quote
6 likes
Quote collection
George Santayana quotes (page 13 of 24)
471 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself."
Read quote
6 likes
"Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age."
Read quote
6 likes
"There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with."
Read quote
6 likes
"Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost."
Read quote
6 likes
"The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit."
Read quote
6 likes
"Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject."
Read quote
6 likes
"All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets."
Read quote
6 likes
"... so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected; it is recognised and obeyed."
Read quote
6 likes
"Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them."
Read quote
6 likes
"Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends."
Read quote
6 likes
"The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive."
Read quote
6 likes
"The unforgivable sin is the refusal to pardon."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends."
Read quote
6 likes
"The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt, and though a thousand later considerations may overlay and override them, they remain a background and standard for all happiness. If we trace them out we succeed."
Read quote
6 likes
"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."
Read quote
6 likes
"Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular.... Every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and the bias which that revelation gives to life."
Read quote
6 likes