Quotes by George Santayana
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The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.

Consciousness is a born hermit.

The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests.

Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.

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.

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.

To know your future you must know your past.

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.

If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.

An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.

The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.

Wisdom comes from disillusionment.

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

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

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.

Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.

The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence.

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.

Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.

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.

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

Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.

To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.

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.

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

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

Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.

Man's most serious activity is play.

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.

Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.

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

I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.

Memory itself is an internal rumour.

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

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.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument, its function is to make the worse appear the better article. A confused competition of all propagandas -- those insults to human nature -- is carried on by the most expert psychological methods -- for instance, by always repeating a lie.

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.

Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.

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.

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

To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.

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

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

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

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

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

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.

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

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.

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

Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

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

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

Work and love these are the basics; waking life is a dream controlled.

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

There is no dunce like a mature dunce.

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.

There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.

The earth has its music for those who will listen.

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.

The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.

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

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

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

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.

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

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

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

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

Depression is rage spread thin.

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

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

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.

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.

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

Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.

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

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

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

The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.

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

America is a young country with an old mentality.

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.

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