George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

— 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

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

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

— 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

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

— George Santayana

The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.

— George Santayana

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

— George Santayana

The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.

— 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

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

— George Santayana

Depression is rage spread thin.

— 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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Oaths are the fossils of piety.

— 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

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.

— 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

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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

— George Santayana

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.

— George Santayana

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.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— 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 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

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

— George Santayana

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

— 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

The muffled syllables that Nature speaks

— George Santayana

America is a young country with an old mentality.

— George Santayana

Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.

— George Santayana

Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— 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

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

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— 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

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

— George Santayana

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

— 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

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

— George Santayana

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.

— George Santayana

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.

— George Santayana

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.

— 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

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

— George Santayana

The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.

— 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

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

— George Santayana

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

— 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

Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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.

— George Santayana

Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

— George Santayana

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

— 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

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

— George Santayana

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

— 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 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

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

— 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

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.

— George Santayana

Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.

— George Santayana

[Everything] ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development.

— George Santayana

Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

— George Santayana

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

— 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

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

— George Santayana

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

— George Santayana

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

— George Santayana

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

— 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 a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

— George Santayana

Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.

— George Santayana

My atheism, like that of

— 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

What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

In proportion as a man's interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates and expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach the same impersonal level of ideas.

— George Santayana

Most men’s conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

— George Santayana

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.

— George Santayana

Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.

— George Santayana

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

— George Santayana

Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor.

— George Santayana

To know how just a cause we have for grieving is already a consolation.

— George Santayana

The mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a truth.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind...They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

— George Santayana

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

— George Santayana

To covet truth is a very distinguished passion.

— 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

No system would have ever been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea of ours is sufficient and right. ** p. 49

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.

— George Santayana

In Walt Whitman democracy is carried into psychology and morals. The various sights, moods, and emotions are given each one vote; they are declared to be all free and equal, and the innumerable commonplace moments of life are suffered to speak like the others. Those moments formerly reputed great are not excluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their companions—plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour.

— George Santayana

Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.

— George Santayana

The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.

— George Santayana

Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its Christianity, in practice, must be largely converted to paganism.

— George Santayana

No doubt the spirit or energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves.

— George Santayana

Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole world is doing things.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors.

— 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

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together.

— George Santayana

Prosperity, both for individuals and for states, means possessions; and possessions mean burdens and harness and slavery; and slavery for the mind, too, because it is not only the rich man's time that is pre-empted, but his affections, his judgement, and the range of his thoughts.

— George Santayana

It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy;

— George Santayana

My atheism, like that of

— George Santayana

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

— George Santayana

Liberalism has merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate interest may fight with every other for domination. Whoever is victorious in this struggle will make an end of liberalism; and the new order, which will deem itself saved, will have to defend itself in the following age against a new crop of rebels.

— George Santayana

I like to walk about amidst 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.

— George Santayana

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.

— George Santayana

The living have never shown me how to live.

— George Santayana

Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.

— 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

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.

— George Santayana

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

— George Santayana

[The empiricist] thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

— George Santayana

Philosophers are as jealous as women. Each wants a monopoly of praise.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension, cheery self-confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so it seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good-will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.

— George Santayana

All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.

— George Santayana

At midday the daily food of all Spaniards was the puchero or cocido, as the dish is really called which the foreigners call pot-pourri or olla podrida. This contains principally yellow chick-peas, with a little bacon, some potatoes or other vegetables and normally also small pieces of beef or sausage, all boiled in one pot at a very slow fire; the liquid of the same makes the substantial broth that is served first.

— George Santayana

... I once shook hands with Longfellow at a garden party in 1881; and I often saw Dr. Holmes, who was our neighbor in Beacon Street: but Emerson I never saw.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

In solitude it is possible to love mankind; in the world, for one who knows the world, there can be nothing but secret or open war.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

O world, thou choosest not the better part!Was all his science and his only art.

— George Santayana

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

— 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

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

— George Santayana

Although a poem be not made by counting of syllables upon the fingers, yet "numbers" is the most poetical synonym we have for verse, and "measure" the most significant equivalent for beauty, for goodness, and perhaps even for truth. Those early and profound philosophers, the followers of Pythagoras, saw the essence of all things in number, and it was by weight, measure, and number, as we read in the Bible, that the Creator first brought Nature out of the void.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

They [the wise spirits of antiquity in the first circle of Dante's Inferno] are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life.

— George Santayana

Habit is stronger than reason.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

I leave you but the sound of many a wordfrom world to world, from all worlds carried me.

— George Santayana

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

— George Santayana

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.

— George Santayana

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.

— George Santayana

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

— 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

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

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

— George Santayana

The intellectual ignominy of believing what we believe simply because of the time and place of our birth, escapes many evolutionists. Far from trying to overcome this natural prejudice of position, they raise it into a point of pride. They declare all opinions ever held in the past to be superseded, and are apparently content that their own should be superseded to-morrow, but meantime they cover you with obloquy if you are so backward or so forward as not to agree with them to-day. They accept as inevitable the total dominion of the point of view. Each new date, even in the life of an individual thinker, is expected by them to mark a new phase of doctrine. Indeed, truth is an object which transcendental philosophy cannot envisage: the absolute ego must be satisfied with consistency. How should the truth, actual, natural, or divine, be an expression of the living will that attempts, or in their case despairs, to discover it? Yet that everything, even the truth, is an expression of the living will, is the corner-stone of this philosophy.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

— George Santayana

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

— 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

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.

— George Santayana

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

— 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

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

— George Santayana

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.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Sanity is madness put to good use.

— George Santayana

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

— 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

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

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

— 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

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

— 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

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

— George Santayana

The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.

— George Santayana

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

— George Santayana

The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.

— 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

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

— George Santayana

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

— George Santayana

Depression is rage spread thin.

— 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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

With you a part of me hath passed away;

— George Santayana

Oaths are the fossils of piety.

— 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

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.

— 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

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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Habit is stronger than reason.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.

— George Santayana

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.

— George Santayana

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

— 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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Sanity is madness put to good use.

— George Santayana

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

— 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

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

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana