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Quotes by George Santayana

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
– George Santayana
The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
– George Santayana
Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.
– George Santayana
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
– George Santayana
The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
– George Santayana
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.
– George Santayana
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
– George Santayana
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
– George Santayana
America is a young country with an old mentality.
– George Santayana
Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.
– George Santayana
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
– George Santayana
Sanity is a madness put to good use.
– George Santayana
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
– George Santayana
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
– George Santayana
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
– George Santayana
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
– George Santayana
Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
– George Santayana
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
– George Santayana
Our character...is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
– George Santayana
The young man who has not wept is a savage,
and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
– George Santayana
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
– George Santayana
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
– George Santayana
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
– George Santayana
Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
– George Santayana
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
– George Santayana
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
– George Santayana
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
– George Santayana
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.
– George Santayana
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.
– George Santayana
Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
– George Santayana
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
– George Santayana
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions their reasons are always different.
– George Santayana
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
– George Santayana
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.
– George Santayana
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
– George Santayana
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
– George Santayana
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
– George Santayana
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
– George Santayana
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate they are green and vigorous in old age.
– George Santayana
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
– George Santayana
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
– George Santayana
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
– George Santayana
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
– George Santayana
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
– George Santayana
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
– George Santayana
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
– George Santayana
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
– George Santayana
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
– George Santayana
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
– George Santayana
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
– George Santayana
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
– George Santayana
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
– George Santayana
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
– George Santayana
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
– George Santayana
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
– George Santayana
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
– George Santayana
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
– George Santayana
Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent it is a salutation, not an embrace.
– George Santayana
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
– George Santayana
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
– George Santayana
It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.
– George Santayana
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
– George Santayana
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
– George Santayana
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
– George Santayana
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another people are friends in spots.
– George Santayana
For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.
– George Santayana
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
– George Santayana
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.
– George Santayana
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.
– George Santayana
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
– George Santayana
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
– George Santayana
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
– George Santayana
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
– George Santayana
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.
– George Santayana
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.
– George Santayana