George Santayana Quotes
Philosopher, Essayist, Poet, & Novelist
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
Sanity is madness put to good use.
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
Depression is rage spread thin.
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
The Bible is literature, not dogma.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
Habit is stronger than reason.
The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
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.
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
America is a young country with an old mentality.
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
Music is essentially useless, as is life.
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.