Santayana Quotes & Sayings

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. — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

The worship of power is an old religion. — 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

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

The unforgivable sin is the refusal to pardon. — George Santayana

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace. — 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

Many pundits today are in the habit of misquoting Santayana's epigram, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Maybe some people have come to grief this way, but they are probably fewer than those who have fallen into the opposite error. One is apt to perish in politics from too much memory, Tocqueville wrote somewhere, with equal truth and greater insight. — David Hackett Fischer

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. — George Santayana

Sanity is a madness put to good uses. — George Santayana

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

All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death. — George Santayana

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

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

A country without a memory is a country of madmen. — George Santayana

Santayana ... reasoned that the young men who were being killed in the war would die anyhow sooner or later, and would be good for nothing while they lived. — Bertrand Russell

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

Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility. — 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

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. — George Santayana

The earth has its music for those who will listen — Reginald Vincent Holmes

The man who is not permitted to own is owned. — George Santayana

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

My soul hates the fool whose only passion is to live by rule. — George Santayana

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end. — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

UNTIL I TOOK UP distance running, I found it easy to take it easy. I had no difficulty following the warnings of the experts. "Avoid stress," cautioned the physicians. I did. "Reduce your tensions," advised the psychologists. I did. "Rest that restless heart," counseled the clergy. I did. Doing these things requires no effort when you are lacking what Santayana called America's ruling passion - a love for business - when you are a lifelong non-joiner whose greatest desire is not to become involved, when almost everyone you meet is less interesting than your own ideas, and when your inner life has more reality than your outer one. — George Sheehan

It is the acme of life to understand life. — 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

Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. — George Santayana

It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas. — George Santayana

With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes. — George Santayana

Wisdom comes by disillusionment. — George Santayana

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

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. — George Santayana

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

The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history. — George Santayana

Fear first created the gods. — George Santayana

Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be. — George Santayana

Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works. — George Santayana

All spiritual interests are supported by animal life. — George Santayana

America is a young country with an old mentality. — George Santayana

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child. — George Santayana

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

The highest form of vanity is love of fame. — George Santayana

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana

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

What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like? — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them. — George Santayana

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

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. — George Santayana

We gain the insight to see ourselves through the friendships we make. They mirror us to ourselves. In them we see clearly what we do not have as well as what the world cannot do without. They do not judge us or condemn us or reject us. They hold us up while we grow, laughing and playing as we go. They bring us to the best of ourselves. "One's friends," George Santayana wrote, "are that part of the human race with which one can be human. — Joan D. Chittister

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

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

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

Man is as full of potential as he is of importance. — George Santayana

The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact. — George Santayana

The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it. — George Santayana

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists. — George Santayana

The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice. — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he. — George Santayana

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

Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment. — George Santayana

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

We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere. — George Santayana

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

The world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes. — 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

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

Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean. — George Santayana

Fanaticism is redoubling your effort after you've forgotten your aim. — 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

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman. — George Santayana

A habitual indulgence in the inarticulate is a sure sign of the philosopher who has not learned to think, the poet who has not learned to write, the painter who has not learned to paint, and the impression that has not learned to express itself
all of which are compatible with an immensity of genius in the inexpressible soul. — 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

What is the part of wisdom? To dream with one eye open; to be detatched from the world without being hostile to it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings, without forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are. — George Santayana

There was a distinct class of these gentlemen tramps, young men no longer young, who wouldn't settle down, who disliked polite society and the genteel conventions, but hadn't enough intelligence or enough conceit to think themselves transcendentalists or poets, in the style of Thoreau or of Walt Whitman. — George Santayana

Beauty is objectified pleasure. — George Santayana

The contemporary world has turned its back on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably. — George Santayana

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

One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye. — George Santayana

Depression is rage spread thin. — George Santayana

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination. — George Santayana

The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken with to themselves. — 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

It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well. — George Santayana

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

Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous. — George Santayana

The profoundest affinities are the most readily felt; they remain a background and standard for all happiness and if we trace them out we succeed. — George Santayana

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

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

Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view; as to knowing her through and through; that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains. — George Santayana