George Santayana Quotes

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another people are frie...

With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by...

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death sup...

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

Progress far from consisting in change depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the pas...

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

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past accord...

Habit is stronger than reason.

The worship of power is an old religion.

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

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

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imagin...

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

The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meanin...

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

Science is nothing but developed perception interpreted intent common sense rounded out and minut...

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium of custom of inertia it is by...

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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

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

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mi...

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.

Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway.

There is nothing sacred about convention there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims ...

To knock a thing down especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle is a deep delight to the blo...

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.

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

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes som...

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a su...

Depression is rage spread thin.

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

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past,...

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse retailing her ancient divinations to a long since ...

To cement a new friendship especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world a ...

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

England is the paradise of individuality eccentricity heresy anomalies hobbies and humours.

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

In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures...

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

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

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

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.

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

If artists and poets are unhappy it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

I believe in the possibility of happiness if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser pass...

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

Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recog...

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running...

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

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

Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo The...

The earth has its music for those who will listen.

The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.

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

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.

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

Happiness is the only sanction of life where happiness fails existence remains a mad and lamentabl...

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

If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathem...

It is wisdom to believe the heart.

Work and love - these are the basics waking life is a dream controlled.

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

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

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

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.

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

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

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

It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on without enquiry and almost at first sight...

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

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

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

Art is a delayed echo.

It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate ...

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

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

To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and l...

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

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

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

Before he sets out the traveller must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by trave...

Happiness is the only sanction in life where happiness fails existence remains a mad and lamentabl...

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

The man who is not permitted to own is owned.

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another people are frien...

My atheism like that of Spinoza is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned ...

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

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

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

Every real object must cease to be what it seemed and none could ever be what the whole soul desired...

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.