George Santayana (1863 – 1952)
Philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist.
Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.
There is a similar quote by Edmund Burke "People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.", but the relationship between them is unclear.
They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life.
There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.
Philosophers are as jealous as women. Each wants a monopoly of praise.
Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind.
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.
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.
Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.
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.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
I like to walk about amidst 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.
The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.
In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.
England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors.
When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind...They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country.