George Santayana: Quotes about the soul

George Santayana was 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism. Explore interesting quotes on soul.

George Santayana: 218 quotes8 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 a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.”

George Santayana

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. II, Reason in Society

“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.”

George Santayana

Source: Dialogues in Limbo (1926), Ch. 3, P. 62

“Liberalism has merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate interest may fight with every other for domination. Whoever is victorious in this struggle will make an end of liberalism; and the new order, which will deem itself saved, will have to defend itself in the following age against a new crop of rebels.”

George Santayana

"The Irony of Liberalism"
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

“The soul, too, has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.”

George Santayana

"Normal Madness," Ch. 3, P. 56 http://books.google.com/books?id=apSwAAAAIAAJ&q=%22The+soul+too+has+her+virginity+and+must+bleed+a+little+before+bearing+fruit%22&pg=PA56#v=onepage <br class="br">Dialogues in Limbo (1926)

“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.”

George Santayana

Obiter Scripta (1936)
Other works

“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.”

George Santayana

O World, Thou Choosest Not http://www.bartleby.com/236/270.html (1894) <br class="br">Other works

“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.”

George Santayana book The Sense of Beauty

Pt. IV, Expression; § 67: "Conclusion.", p. 270
The Sense of Beauty (1896)

“It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy;”

George Santayana

"The Irony of Liberalism"
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)