George Santayana's Quotes

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

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.

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

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

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

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.

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

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.

The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.

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

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

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

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.

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

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

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

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

To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.

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.

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.

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

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.

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

By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

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

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

Oaths are the fossils of piety.

Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

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

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

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

I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.

Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

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.

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

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

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.

The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.

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.

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.

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

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

Depression is rage spread thin.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

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