Quotes by George Santayana

• For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
• Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
• All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
• 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.
• A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey 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.
• A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
• America is a young country with an old mentality.
• Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
• Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
• For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.
• Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
• Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
• Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
• Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
• 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.
• 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.
• Depression is rage spread thin.
• Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.
• Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
• Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
• 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.
• An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
• Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
• A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
• Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
• Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
• Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
• Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
• Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
• To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
• Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.
• 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.
• Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
• When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
• History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
• Oaths are the fossils of piety.
• We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
• Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
• 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.
• To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
• One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
• Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
• Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
• 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.
• Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
• 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.
• Music is essentially useless, as is life.
• Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
• 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.
• Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
• Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.
• Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
• Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
• Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
• 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.
• Habit is stronger than reason.
• It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
• Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
• It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
• It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
• 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.
• Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
• Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
• In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
• If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
• 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.
• I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
• It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
• The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
• Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
• The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
• The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
• The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
• 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 truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
• The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
• The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
• 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 passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
• Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.
• The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
• There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
• 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.
• There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
• Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
• To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
• To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
• To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
• To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
• The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
• The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
• The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
• Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
• Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
• Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
• Sanity is madness put to good use.
• Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
• Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
• That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
• The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.
• The Bible is literature, not dogma.
• 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.
• The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
• Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
• 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 dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
• The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
• The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
• The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
• The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
• 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 lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.