Marriage Quote by George Santayana

Santayana doesn’t flatter “the common man” here; he vivisects him with a metaphor designed to sting. Calling popular philosophy an “old wife” is deliberately domestic, unglamorous, and faintly cruel: it’s not a thrilling romance of ideas but a long, binding companionship. The line turns on a double indictment. First, the common person’s worldview provides “no pleasure” because it’s rarely chosen for beauty or truth; it’s inherited, practical, and dull, the mental furniture you stop noticing. Second, he “cannot live without her” because those half-conscious assumptions - about fairness, God, nation, decency, what counts as “normal” - are the scaffolding that keeps everyday life coherent.

The nastiest (and most accurate) move is the final clause: he “resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.” Santayana is describing how belief becomes identity. Your working philosophy may bore you, even irritate you, but criticism from outsiders feels like an insult to your home, your people, your sense of being sane. The “strangers” aren’t just foreigners; they’re intellectuals, reformers, aesthetes - anyone who asks you to notice your own premises. The reaction isn’t argument so much as protective jealousy: don’t talk about my wife.

Context matters: Santayana, a patrician skeptic watching mass democracy and modern ideologies harden, is diagnosing the sentimental nationalism and moral conventionalism of his age. He’s also warning philosophers: the public doesn’t defend its worldview because it’s persuasive, but because it’s intimate. Critique lands as scandal, not as a seminar.