George Santayana quotes
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“It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on first, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the parts known give us evidence enough that the unknown parts cannot be much amiss.”
-- George Santayana -
“The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.”
-- George SantayanaSource : Quoted in Reader's Digest, Nov. 1939 See Calonne 1; Nansen 1; Trollope 3
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“The wisest mind has something yet to learn.”
-- George SantayanaSource : George Santayana (1936). “The Works of George Santayana”
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“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
-- George Santayana -
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“Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.”
-- George SantayanaSource : George Santayana, Marianne S. Wokeck, Martin A. Coleman, James Gouinlock (2011). “The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense, Volume VII, Book One”, p.135, MIT Press
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“An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.”
-- George SantayanaSource : Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 3
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“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”
-- George SantayanaSource : Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies "War Shrines" (1922)
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“To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.”
-- George Santayana -
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“love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.”
-- George Santayana -
“Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.”
-- George SantayanaSource : George Santayana (1970). “Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe”, p.221, Library of Alexandria
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“Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.”
-- George SantayanaSource : George Santayana (1970). “Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, and Goethe”, p.19, Library of Alexandria
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“The earth has music for those who listen.”
-- George Santayana -
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“A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”
-- George Santayana -
“Only the dead have seen the end of the war.”
-- George Santayana -
“To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.”
-- George Santayana -
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“To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.”
-- George Santayana -
“Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.”
-- 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 -
“For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.”
-- George Santayana -
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“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”
-- 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 -
“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.”
-- George Santayana -
“Wisdom comes by disillusionment.”
-- George Santayana#Wisdom Quotes #Words Of Wisdom Quotes #Disillusionment Quotes
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“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 -
“It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.”
-- 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 highest form of vanity is love of fame.”
-- George Santayana -
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“Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.”
-- George Santayana -
“Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.”
-- George Santayana -
“To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.”
-- George Santayana -
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“The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.”
-- George Santayana -
“Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.”
-- George Santayana -
“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.”
-- George Santayana -
“Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.”
-- George Santayana -
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“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 -
“The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.”
-- George Santayana -
“We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”
-- 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 SantayanaSource : George Santayana (2011). “The Life of Reason: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense”, p.172, MIT Press
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“Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.”
-- 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 -
“That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.”
-- George Santayana -
“Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.”
-- George Santayana -
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“Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable, precisely, the balance and wisdom that come from long perspectives and broad foundations”
-- George Santayana -
“The family is one of nature's masterpieces.”
-- George Santayana -
“Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.”
-- George SantayanaSource : George Santayana (2012). “The Sense of Beauty”, p.153, Courier Corporation
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“There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.”
-- George Santayana -
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“The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.”
-- George Santayana -
“The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.”
-- George Santayana -
“When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.”
-- George Santayana -
“The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.”
-- George Santayana -
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“If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.”
-- George Santayana -
“Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.”
-- George Santayana -
“One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”
-- George Santayana -
“History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.”
-- George Santayana -
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“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”
-- George Santayana -
“There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.”
-- George Santayana -
“The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.”
-- George Santayana -
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“History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.”
-- 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 -
“Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.”
-- George Santayana -
“Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.”
-- George Santayana -
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“Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.”
-- George Santayana -
“The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.”
-- George Santayana -
“Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.”
-- George Santayana -
“There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.”
-- George Santayana -
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“The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again”
-- George Santayana -
“Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.”
-- George Santayana -
“Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.”
-- George Santayana -
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“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.”
-- George Santayana -
“Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.”
-- George SantayanaSource : George Santayana, Marianne S. Wokeck, Martin A. Coleman, James Gouinlock (2011). “The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense, Volume VII, Book One”, p.75, MIT Press
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“Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.”
-- George Santayana -
“For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned”
-- George Santayana -
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“The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.”
-- George Santayana -
“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.”
-- George SantayanaSource : Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies "The Irony of Liberalism" (1922)
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“The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive”
-- George Santayana -
“Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.”
-- George Santayana -
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“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
-- George Santayana -
“The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.”
-- George Santayana -
“A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.”
-- George Santayana -
“Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”
-- George SantayanaSource : The Life of Reason vol. 1, introduction (1905)
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“What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.”
-- George Santayana -
“Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.”
-- 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 -
“Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.”
-- George Santayana -
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“There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal.”
-- George Santayana -
“Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.”
-- George Santayana -
“Better not be a hero than work oneself up into heroism by shouting lies.”
-- George Santayana -
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“Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it...”
-- George Santayana -
“Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.”
-- George Santayana -
“Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home.”
-- George Santayana -
“Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.”
-- George Santayana -
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“In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.”
-- George Santayana -
“It is a pleasant surprise to him (the pure mathematician) and an added problem if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them, much as if a composer found that sailors could heave better when singing his songs.”
-- George Santayana -
“Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.”
-- George Santayana -
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