Daily Inspiration Quote by George Santayana

Santayana needles a certain kind of self-dramatizing temperament: the person who treats stability not as a refuge but as an insult. “Domestic bliss” here isn’t just marriage-and-kids coziness; it’s the ordinary, repetitive architecture of a life that’s working. The sting is in the verb choice. You don’t “feel” domestic bliss, you “appreciate” it - as if contentment is an acquired taste, closer to aesthetic judgment than to raw emotion. That frames happiness as something cultivated, not chased, and it quietly demotes passion from virtue to impulse.

The second clause flips the moral script with surgical irony. “Volatile spirits” sounds romantic, even flattering, but Santayana uses it to diagnose a preference, not a fate: they “prefer unhappiness.” The subtext is that misery can be a performance and a stimulant. Unhappiness offers narrative - conflict, intensity, self-importance - while peace demands patience, which is another word for tolerating boredom, ambiguity, and the slow accrual of meaning. If your identity depends on friction, harmony feels like disappearance.

Context matters: Santayana, an immigrant intellectual with a cool, classical sensibility, distrusted modern cults of intensity. Writing in an era that increasingly glamorized restless desire - in art, politics, even romance - he’s defending the unsexy virtues: steadiness, attention, gratitude. The line works because it’s a provocation disguised as advice: if you keep “falling” into chaos, maybe it’s not bad luck. Maybe it’s taste.