George Santayana Quotes About Atheism
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For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
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There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
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History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
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Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular.... Every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and the bias which that revelation gives to life.
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Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that 'a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.' At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.
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Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom - picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode - may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair.
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Fear first created the gods.
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That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
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Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.
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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.
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Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.
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It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.
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Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.
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Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.
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George Santayana
- Born: December 16, 1863
- Died: September 26, 1952
- Occupation: Philosopher
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