Famous George Santayana Quotations

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"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment."
by George Santayana
"Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better."
by George Santayana
"The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal."
by George Santayana
"The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation."
by George Santayana
"Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him."
by George Santayana
"The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it."
by George Santayana
"A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity."
by George Santayana
"The family is one of nature's masterpieces."
by George Santayana
"The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him."
by George Santayana
"The highest form of vanity is love of fame."
by George Santayana
"The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art."
by George Santayana
"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."
by George Santayana
"The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others."
by George Santayana
"The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk."
by George Santayana
"The Soul is the voice of the body's interests."
by George Santayana
"The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns."
by George Santayana
"To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired."
by George Santayana
"Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth."
by George Santayana
"Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it."
by George Santayana
"Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds."
by George Santayana
"Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit."
by George Santayana
"I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads."
by George Santayana
"It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands."
by George Santayana
"Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator."
by George Santayana
"Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it."
by George Santayana
"Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body."
by George Santayana
"Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end."
by George Santayana
"Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated."
by George Santayana
"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."
by George Santayana
"It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig."
by George Santayana
"Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality."
by George Santayana
"Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots."
by George Santayana
"Depression is rage spread thin."
by George Santayana
"Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said."
by George Santayana
"All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato."
by George Santayana
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
by George Santayana
"Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace."
by George Santayana
"Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others."
by George Santayana
"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."
by George Santayana
"... everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence."
by George Santayana
"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."
by George Santayana
"A child only educated at school is an uneducated child."
by George Santayana
"A child educated only at school is an uneducated child."
by George Santayana
"A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present."
by George Santayana
"A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world."
by George Santayana
"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."
by George Santayana
"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."
by George Santayana
"Advertising is the modern substitute for argument its function is to make the worse appear the better."
by George Santayana
"All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."
by George Santayana
"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."
by George Santayana
"America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences."
by George Santayana
"An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity."
by George Santayana
"An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world."
by George Santayana
"Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel."
by George Santayana
"Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine."
by George Santayana
"By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all."
by George Santayana
"Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character."
by George Santayana
"Culture is on the horns of this dilemma if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean."
by George Santayana
"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."
by George Santayana
"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."
by George Santayana
"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 enabline it to make its peace with its destiny."
by George Santayana
"Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end."
by George Santayana
"Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them."
by George Santayana
"Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim"
by George Santayana
"Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim."
by George Santayana
"Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim."
by George Santayana
"For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned."
by George Santayana
"For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep."
by George Santayana
"Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things: and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is."
by George Santayana
"Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is."
by George Santayana
"Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy."
by George Santayana
"Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different."
by George Santayana
"Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions their reasons are always different."
by George Santayana
"Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better."
by George Santayana
"Friendship is constant in all other things Save in the office and affairs of love."
by George Santayana
"Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another people are friends in spots."
by George Santayana
"Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors."
by George Santayana
"Habit is stronger than reason."
by George Santayana
"Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves."
by George Santayana
"Happiness is the only sanction of life where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment."
by George Santayana
"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."
by George Santayana
"If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved."
by George Santayana
"In Greece wise men speak and fools decide."
by George Santayana
"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."
by George Santayana
"Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it."
by George Santayana
"Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it."
by George Santayana
"Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are."
by George Santayana
"It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well."
by George Santayana
"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."
by George Santayana
"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."
by George Santayana
"It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness."
by George Santayana
"It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas."
by George Santayana
"Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness."
by George Santayana
"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."
by George Santayana
"Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome."
by George Santayana
"Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament."
by George Santayana
"Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament."
by George Santayana
"Love is only half the illusion the lover, but not his love, is deceived."
by George Santayana
"Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, not condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion."
by George Santayana
"Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion."
by George Santayana


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