George Santayana Quotes (196 Quotes)

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

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

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.

England is not the best possible world but it is the best actual country, and a great rest after America

The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

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

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

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

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

Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.

An artist may visit a museum, but only a pedant can live there

Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity

Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.

The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.

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

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.

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

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.

Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.

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

O World, thou choosest not the better part It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart.

The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.

Habit is stronger than reason.

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.

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity

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

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

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

Prejudice is a great time saver. It enables you to form opinions without bothering to get the facts.

Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience the union of life and peace.

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

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

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

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.

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.

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.

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

In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality. The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.

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