George Santayana Quotes

Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.

... so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected; it is recognised and obeyed.

Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.

We do right enough darling, if we go wrong together.

A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.

Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely a vehicle for joy.

It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

You and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams.

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.

A simple life is its own reward.

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.

People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.

Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.

Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Spirit itself is not human; it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?

The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.

Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom - picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode - may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair.

To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.

To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of its content.

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. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.

A country without a memory is a country of madmen.

Sanity is madness put to good use.

Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.

Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.

The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.

Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.