George Santayana Quotes

Every Warrior of the Light has suffered for the most trivial of reasons.

A tension or difficulty can signal the approach of a new grace of God. But it has to be looked at wisely and humanly.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

The examined life is no picnic.

The final goal of all human endeavor is the development of the human soul.

Fighting for one's freedom, struggling towards being free, is like struggling to be a poet or a good Christian or a good Jew or a good Muslim or good Zen Buddhist. You work all day long and achieve some kind of level of success by nightfall, go to sleep and wake up the next morning with the job still to be done. So you start all over again.

I'm just like you - I want to be a good human being. I'm doing my best, and I'm working at it. And I'm trying to be a Christian. I'm always amazed when people walk up to me and say, 'I'm a Christian.' I always think, 'Already? You've already got it?' I'm working at it. And at my age, I'll still be working at it at 96.

Sometimes you have to be very bad before you can be very good.

The toughest opponent is me. A lot of times, you don't want to train. You don't want to box. Sometimes, life hits you to the point where you don't even want to live. You have to fight with that person. You have to make yourself wake up in the morning. You have to make yourself watch your weight. That's how I fight with that person.

I must only warn you of one thing. You have become a different person in the course of these years. For this is what the art of archery means: a profound and far-reaching contest of the archer with himself. Perhaps you have hardly noticed it yet, but you will feel it very strongly when you meet your friends and acquaintances again in your own country: things will no longer harmonize as before. You will see with other eyes and measure with other measures. It has happened to me too, and it happens to all who are touched by the spirit of this art.

I am but a poor struggling soul yearning to be wholly good, wholly truthful and wholly non-violent in thought, word and deed, but ever failing to reach the ideal which I know to be true. It is a painful climb, but each step upwards makes me feel stronger and fit for the next.

Suffering can make saints of people as they learn patience, long-suffering and self-mastery.

The essence of our whole path is in that place of discomfort, and what do we do with it?

In life one must decide whether to conjugate the verb to have or the verb to be.

Contemplation: I read a lot of books on philosophy and religion, and try to keep always growing in that part of my life, because without having a spiritual grounding, I think you can get really swayed by the winds of all the praise or the criticism; it's all very, kind of, up and down. Try to stay up and focused.

A temptation is the universe's gracious way of allowing a soul to evolve without creating negative karma. In other words, a temptation is like a magnet that draws to awareness, negativity, that would otherwise create negative karma if it remained unconscious. A temptation is a dress rehearsal for a negative karmic act.

He wants to see whether we are capable of overcoming out base instincts, of killing the Satan within ourselves. We have no right to despair. And if he punishes us mercilessly, it is a sign that He loves us that much more.

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.

Every problem is a character-building opportunity, and the more difficult it is, the greater the potential for building spiritual muscle and moral fiber.

It wasn't until after I'd been around Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts, that I started to reflect about issues like the evolution of consciousness.

The way towards 'wisdom' or towards 'freedom' is the way towards your inner being. This is the simplest definition of metaphysics.

The Spirit of man is like a kite, which rises by means of those very forces which seem to oppose its rise; the tie that joins it to the earth, the opposing winds of temptation, and the weight of earth-born affections which it carries with it into the sky.

On the field of The Self stand a knight and a dragon. You are the knight. Resistance is the dragon.

With age, I have become both more pious and more shameless.

Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.