George Santayana Quotes (196 Quotes)

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

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

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.

Sanity is a madness put to good uses waking life is a dream controlled.

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

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

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak

There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.

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

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

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.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The profoundest affinities are the most readily felt they remain a background and standard for all happiness and if we trace them out we succeed.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.

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.

Reason and happiness are like other flowers -- they wither when plucked.

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

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

A country without a memory is a country of madmen.

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.

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

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

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.

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

The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.

Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.

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.

A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.

There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.

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

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

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

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.

America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.

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.

To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of the content.

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

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

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous