George Santayana Quotes

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.

Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

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.

Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.

All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.

If clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary matters.

Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.

The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.

To drink in the spirit of a place you should be not only alone but unhurried.

Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.

It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on first, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the parts known give us evidence enough that the unknown parts cannot be much amiss.

Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.

America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.

Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They all may collapse altogether.

The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.

It is one thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagination.

To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.

Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular.... Every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and the bias which that revelation gives to life.

Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.

Depression is rage spread thin.

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

The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.

Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.

We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.

Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.

The world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes.

A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.

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

A fanatical imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel.

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.

You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete sceptic or idealist, but a realist at heart. So long as he is alive his sincere philosophy must fulfil the assumptions of his life and not destroy him.

Fear first created the gods.

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

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.

Love is at once more animal than friendship and more divine.

Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.

The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.

Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.

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

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.