QuoteProject
Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.
George Santayana
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote suggests that people often turn to supernatural beliefs when they are in desperate situations.

George Santayana's quote reflects on the human tendency to seek refuge in supernatural beliefs during times of great hardship or despair. It implies that faith in the supernatural, while often viewed as a source of hope and comfort, can also stem from a place of desperation and vulnerability when faced with the challenges of life.

Themes

FaithSupernaturalDesperationFortuneBelief

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a discussion about the role of religion in coping with life's challenges.

More from George Santayana

It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
George SantayanaRead
The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.
George SantayanaRead
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.
George SantayanaRead
Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.
George SantayanaRead
To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
George SantayanaRead
The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
George SantayanaRead

Similar quotes

To be idle and to be poor have always been reproaches, and therefore every man endeavors with his utmost care to hide his poverty from others, and his idleness from himself.
Samuel JohnsonRead
Once I got into space, I was feeling very comfortable in the universe. I felt like I had a right to be anywhere in this universe, that I belonged here as much as any speck of stardust, any comet, any planet.
Mae JemisonRead
What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.
AristotleRead
Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression.
Marshall McluhanRead
They came from the four corners of the earth, driven by hunger, plague, tumors, and the cold, and stopped here. They couldn’t go any futrther because of the ocean. That’s France, that’s the French people.
Louis-Ferdinand CelineRead
The real secrets of Masonry are never told, not even from mouth to ear. For the real secret of Masonry is spoken to your heart and from it to the heart of your brother. Never the language made for tongue may speak it, it is uttered only in the eye in those manifestations of that love which a man has for his friend, which passeth all other loves.
William Howard TaftRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.