Daily Inspiration Quote by George Santayana

Santayana is diagnosing the mind’s selective hospitality: we don’t greet reality as it is, we greet the version of it our nerves, habits, and identities can survive. The line has the cool sting of a philosopher who’s watched reason dress up as morality. “Whatever they are ready to cope with” sounds compassionate, almost therapeutic, until the rest of the sentence snaps shut: what we can’t handle, we don’t merely fail to understand; we moralize against it, brand it “monstrous and wrong,” or retreat into the safer claim that it “can’t be possible.” He’s not describing ignorance as a lack of information but as an active defense mechanism.

The craft here is the escalation. First, we “ignore” - passive omission. Then we “pronounce” - public judgment, a kind of social policing. Finally, we “deny” - the deepest refusal, where facts are treated as threats to the self. Santayana maps a psychology that doubles as a political theory: communities, like individuals, launder fear into certainty. What can’t be integrated becomes heresy, monstrosity, or “fake.”

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of modernity’s shocks - Darwinian evolution, industrial upheaval, world war - Santayana watched Western confidence wobble. His skepticism toward human rationality isn’t nihilism; it’s a warning that “common sense” is often just a coping style with institutional backing. The subtext is blunt: tolerance isn’t a virtue we summon from thin air. It expands only as our capacity to cope expands. Until then, moral outrage is frequently just panic in formal wear.