George Santayana Quotes
Most popular George Santayana Quotes
Habit is stronger than reason.
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
It is wisdom to believe the heart.
The Bible is literature, not dogma.
Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
The wisest mind hath something to learn.
Music is essentially useless, as is life.
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
Theory helps us bear our ignorance of facts.
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.
Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.
Knowledge of the possible is the beginning of happiness.
A child educated only at school is an undereducated child.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.
Myths are not believed in, they are conceived and understood.
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve.
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
To the art of working well a civilized race would add the art of playing well.
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh a fool.
Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand. The whole world is doing things.
If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.
Nothing is so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.
We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.
Words are weapons, and it is dangerous in speculation, as in politics, to borrow them from our enemies.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.
What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.
The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.
Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
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.
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interests in the present.
Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When...experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.
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.
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men into their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting that the text. The world is one of these books.
I like to walk about amidst 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.
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.
Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities.
Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.
Our dignity is not in what we do but in what we understand.
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting that the text. The world is one of these books.
