George Santayana Quotes & Sayings

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired. — George Santayana

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

It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases. — George Santayana

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

It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to. — George Santayana

Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals, whereas with us the intervals are all. — George Santayana

Even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not; and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one. — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself. — George Santayana

Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life. — George Santayana

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

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. — George Santayana

Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age. — George Santayana

The living have never shown me how to live. — George Santayana

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

The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family. — George Santayana

For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing. — George Santayana

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained. — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

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

A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world. — George Santayana

I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free, from world to world, from all worlds carried me. — George Santayana

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

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

Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men. — George Santayana

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations. — George Santayana

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others. — George Santayana

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

Man's most serious activity is play. — George Santayana

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others. — George Santayana

Fear first created the gods. — George Santayana

Why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together. — George Santayana

The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt. — George Santayana

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

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

One real world is enough. — George Santayana

The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke. — George Santayana

Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedism, extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like Buddhism, it had looked only for peace and the liberation of souls. It looked beyond; it dreamt of infinite blisses and crowns it should be crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God ... Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with anesthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire. — George Santayana

I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me. — George Santayana

In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess. — George Santayana

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

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato. — George Santayana

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

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

People who feel themselves to be exiles in this world are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another. — George Santayana

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

The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred. — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of them that has grown into a jealous passion. — George Santayana

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

The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art. — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. — George Santayana

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

In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; ... They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour. — George Santayana

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

It is true that I am carrying out various methods of treatment recommended by doctors and dentists in the hope of dying in the remote future in perfect health. — George Santayana

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

To know your future you must know your past — George Santayana

At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself, or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat. — George Santayana

Nothing is so irrevocable as mind. — George Santayana

Faith in the intellect ... is the only faith yet sanctioned by its fruits — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

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

The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its total temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition; and candor and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost. — George Santayana

Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge. — George Santayana

Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace. — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths. — George Santayana

He described what he knew best or had heard most, and felt he had described the universe. (on Hegel) — George Santayana

Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act wisely. — George Santayana

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

Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him. — George Santayana

Time and Space are not prior to creation, they are forms under which creation becomes thinkable. — George Santayana

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

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. — George Santayana

Depression is rage spread thin. — George Santayana

I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism. — George Santayana

When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains. — George Santayana

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be. — George Santayana

In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else — George Santayana

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles. — George Santayana

Until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play. — George Santayana

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator. — George Santayana

There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable. — George Santayana

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

Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually towards another, makes it one of the dearest employments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solicitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty? — George Santayana

There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far. — George Santayana

Love is at once more animal than friendship and more divine ... — George Santayana

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

Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience. — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

Columbus gave the world another world. — George Santayana

As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends. — George Santayana

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

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

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. — George Santayana

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

By "essence" I understand a universal, of any degree of complexity and definition, which may be given immediately, whether to sense or to thought ... This object of pure sense or pure thought, with no belief superadded, an object inwardly complete and individual, but without external relations or physical status, is what I call an essence. — George Santayana

When we feel the poetic thrill, is it not that we find sweep in the concise and depth in the clear, as we might find all the lights of the sea in the water of a jewel? And what is a philosophic thought but such an epitome? — George Santayana