George Santayana Quotes

To most people, I fancy, the stars are beautiful; but if you asked why, they would be at a loss to reply, until they remembered what they had heard about astronomy, and the great size and distance and possible habitation of those orbs. ... [We] persuade ourselves that the power of the starry heavens lies in the suggestion of astronomical facts.

Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable, precisely, the balance and wisdom that come from long perspectives and broad foundations

Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.

Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Awe very properly hangs about it, since it is the immovable standard and silent witness of all our memories and assertions; and the past and the future, which in our anxious life are so differently interesting and so differently dark, are one seamless garment for the truth, shining like the sun.

Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.

The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.

Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.

The truth properly means the sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities andrelations which the world has exemplified or will exemplify. The truth is all things seen under the form of eternity.

To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.

The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.

Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.

In any close society it is more urgent to restrain others than to be free oneself. Hence the tendency for the central authority to absorb and supersede such as are local or delegated.

Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.

Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.

Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.

Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.

Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.

It would be hard to conceive a system of instincts more nicely adjusted, where the constituents should represent or support one another better. The husband has an interest in protecting the wife, she in serving the husband. The weaker gains in authority and safety, the wilder and more unconcerned finds a help-mate at home to take thought of his daily necessities. Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality....The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal.

Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair.

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.

It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.

Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.

The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.

Columbus found a world, and had no chart save one that Faith deciphered in the skies.

What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.

Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.

Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival; they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, "Please strike here!

Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.

Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panza's who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixote's with a sense for ideals, but mad.

The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.