George Santayana Quotes

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

Memory itself is an internal rumour.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

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.

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

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.

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.

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.

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.

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

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.

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer; there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

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.

Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

Depression is rage spread thin.

Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

The earth has music for those who listen.

There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.

The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

One real world is enough.

The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway

An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.

Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.

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

Nothing you can lose by dying is half as precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility.

Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.

The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

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.

The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.

Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.

Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.

The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.

Habit is stronger than reason.