George Santayana Quotes (196 Quotes)


    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.

    The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence

    Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.

    Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

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


    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.

    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.

    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.


    Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

    England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors

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

    If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.


    The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best-chosen word

    Love is only half the illusion the lover, but not his love, is deceived.

    Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

    There is no cure for birth and death other than to enjoy the interval

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

    Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

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

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

    The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.

    To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

    The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

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

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


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

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


    Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

    Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

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


    To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful.

    Love makes us poets, and the approach of death should makes us philosophers

    Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.

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

    It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.


    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.

    For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.

    Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.

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

    Philosophers are as jealous as women each wants a monopoly of praise


    Related Authors


    Immanuel Kant - David Hume - Thomas Carlyle - Thales - Soren Kierkegaard - Protagoras - Plotinus - Mortimer Adler - Martin Heidegger - Diogenes


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