"Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public."
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Quote collection
George Santayana quotes (page 23 of 24)
471 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers."
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"It would be hard to conceive a system of instincts more nicely adjusted, where the constituents should represent or support one another better. The husband has an interest in protecting the wife, she in serving the husband. The weaker gains in authority and safety, the wilder and more unconcerned finds a help-mate at home to take thought of his daily necessities. Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality."
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"The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations."
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"Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center."
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"To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind."
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"At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself, or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat."
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"The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies."
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"Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works."
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"With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes."
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"The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken with to themselves."
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"If clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary matters."
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"There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself."
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"History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory."
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"Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events."
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"Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them."
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"In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else"
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"All beauties are to be honored, but only one embraced."
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"O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies; To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art."
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"The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life."
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