George Santayana: Quotes about the world

“The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.”

George Santayana

Love , World , Beauty , Courage

“To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.”

George Santayana

World , Learning , Passion , Happiness

“There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.”

George Santayana

Books , World

“No doubt the spirit or energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves.”

George Santayana

Source: Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion (1913), p. 199

World , Cry , Sea

“In solitude it is possible to love mankind; in the world, for one who knows the world, there can be nothing but secret or open war.”

George Santayana

Source: Persons and Places (1944), p. 159

Love , War , Secret , World

“Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master.”

George Santayana

"The British Character"
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

World

“I leave you but the sound of many a word
In mocking echoes haply overheard,
I sang to heaven. My exile made me free,
from world to world, from all worlds carried me.”

George Santayana

The Poet's Testament http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-poet-s-testament/
Other works

World

“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.”

George Santayana

"Dickens"
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

World

“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.”

George Santayana

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

World , Beauty , Personality , Wealth

“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)
Other works

Wisdom , World , Faith , Art

“Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.”

George Santayana

Source: The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. II, Reason in Society, Ch. IV: The Aristocratic Ideal

Fate , World

“Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole world is doing things.”

George Santayana

Source: Winds of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion (1913), p. 199

World , Understanding

“Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature's meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal.”

George Santayana

Source: The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905-1906), Vol. V, Reason in Science, Ch. 3 "Mechanism"

World , Imagination , Mathematics , Nature

“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.”

George Santayana

Interpretations of Poetry and Religion http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/13960/t3028sf4m?urlappend=%3Bseq=72 (1900), p. 54
Other works

God , World , Religion , Justice