George Santayana Quotes

The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.

The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.

The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.

The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger.

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.

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

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.

A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.

Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.

To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.

The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.

It is wisdom to believe the heart.

Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.

For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.

The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.

Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.

I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, un-travelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion.

Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.

In this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express; the choice lies between a mask and a figleaf.

It is a pleasant surprise to him (the pure mathematician) and an added problem if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them, much as if a composer found that sailors could heave better when singing his songs.

Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.

Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.

The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.

To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.

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

If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.

With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.

One real world is enough.

Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

America is a young country with an old mentality.

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

There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar and anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce stupidity. Such a headless people has the mind of a worm and the claws of a dragon.

Man is not made to understand life, but to live it.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. ...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion.

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices.

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.

Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.

If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.

Sometimes we have to change the truth in order to remember it.

The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.