George Santayana Quotes

Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.

Memory... is an internal rumor.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.

People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.

A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.

Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age

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

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.

The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.

All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death.

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home.

At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself, or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat.

Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.

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

Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms.

The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.

Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them.

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

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

I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.

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.

To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.

People who feel themselves to be exiles in this world are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.

Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.

It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.

why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.

I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.

Happiness is impossible, and even inconceivable, to a mind without scope and without pause, a mind driven by craving, pleasure, or fear. To be happy, you must be reasonable, or you must be tamed. You must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world and what things in it can really serve you. To be happy, you must be wise.

The unforgivable sin is the refusal to pardon.

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.

Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.

A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.

It is true that I am carrying out various methods of treatment recommended by doctors and dentists in the hope of dying in the remote future in perfect health.

Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.

Each religion necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself. Religions, like languages, are necessary rivals. What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.

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

Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.

Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.

Better not be a hero than work oneself up into heroism by shouting lies.