George Santayana Quotes

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he.

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

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

Beware of long arguments and long beards.

Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.

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

Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.

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

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.

The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.

By "essence" I understand a universal, of any degree of complexity and definition, which may be given immediately, whether to sense or to thought.... This object of pure sense or pure thought, with no belief superadded, an object inwardly complete and individual, but without external relations or physical status, is what I call an essence.

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.

It is the acme of life to understand life.

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.

The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.... If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is the spirit.

Man alone knows that he must die; but that very knowledge raises him, in a sense, above mortality, by making him a sharer in the vision of eternal truth. He becomes the spectator of his own tragedy; he sympathizes so much with the fury of the storm that he has no ears left for the shipwrecked sailor, though the sailor were his own soul. The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

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

There is no dunce like a mature dunce.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

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

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.

If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.

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

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

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

Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.

As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends.

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

There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor's chair.

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

Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.

Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.

Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.

... even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not; and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.

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

The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.

Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually towards another, makes it one of the dearest employments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solicitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty?

Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.

Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.

I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.

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

An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.

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.

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

It is a great bond to dislike the same things.