George Santayana Quotes

What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word--the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.

Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.

Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.

There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.

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

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.

There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.

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

My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

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

Art is a delayed echo.

The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them

It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.

There is no right government except good government.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

Man's most serious activity is play.

Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.

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

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

Habit is stronger than reason.

All beauties are to be honored, but only one embraced.

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

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

Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.

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.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.

Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.

Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities.

When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.

We are not compelled in naturalism, or even in materialism, to ignore immaterial things; the point is that any immaterial things which are recognized shall be regarded as names, aspects, functions, or concomitant products of those physical things among which action goes on.

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

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

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that 'a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.' At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

Order, for a liberal, means only peace; and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.

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

...science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common-sense rounded out and minutely articulated. It is therefore as much an instinctive product, as much a stepping forth of human courage in the dark, as is any inevitable dream or impulsive action.

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.

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

With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.