George Santayana – 55 Quotes

Share the love

 

55 Quotes by George Santayana

 

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

– George Santayana


Music is essentially useless, as is life.

– George Santayana


Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

– George Santayana


The family is one of nature’s masterpieces.

– George Santayana


Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

– George Santayana


Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

– George Santayana


Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

– George Santayana


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

– George Santayana


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

– George Santayana


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

– George Santayana


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

– George Santayana


The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

– George Santayana


For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.

– George Santayana


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

– George Santayana


Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

– George Santayana


One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

– George Santayana


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

– George Santayana


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

– George Santayana


To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

– George Santayana


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

– George Santayana


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

– George Santayana


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

– George Santayana


It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.

– George Santayana


The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

– George Santayana


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

– George Santayana


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

– George Santayana


History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.

– George Santayana


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

– George Santayana


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

– George Santayana


When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions their reasons are always different.

– George Santayana


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

– George Santayana


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

– George Santayana


Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.

– 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


To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

– George Santayana


Happiness is the only sanction of life where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

– George Santayana


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

– George Santayana


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

– George Santayana


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

– 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


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

– George Santayana


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

– 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


Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions their reasons are always different.

– 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


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

– George Santayana


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

– 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


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.

– George Santayana


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.

– George Santayana


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.

– 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


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.

– 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


Leave a Reply