George Santayana famous quotes

It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on first, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the parts known give us evidence enough that the unknown parts cannot be much amiss.
-- George Santayana

#Friendship #Sight #Giving

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

#Motivational #Perseverance #Courage

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
-- George Santayana

#Graduation #Wisdom #Diversity

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

#Past #History #Remember

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
-- George Santayana

#Happiness #Work #Character

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

#Dream #Art #Design

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

#Inspirational #Life #Birthday

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

#Love #Positive #Happiness

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
-- George Santayana

#Love #Death #Philosopher

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
-- George Santayana

#Happiness #Success #Education

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
-- George Santayana

#Vision #Quickness

The earth has music for those who listen.
-- George Santayana

#Music #Encouragement #Art

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

#Education #Teacher #Children

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
-- George Santayana

#Military #War #Philosophical

To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.
-- George Santayana

#Taken #Passion #World

Depression is rage spread thin.
-- George Santayana

#Depression #Depressing #Pain

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

#Inspirational #Life #Philosophical

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

#Order #Names #Confusion

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 #Happy #Determination

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

#Sleep #Men #Hair

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

#Marriage #Patience #Appreciate

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

#Future #Past #Welcome

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

#Life #Soul #Welcome

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
-- George Santayana

#Wisdom #Words Of Wisdom #Disillusionment

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

#Revenge #Passion #Thinking

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

#Wells #Pleasant

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

#Integrity #Character #Destiny

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

#Vanity #Reputation #Fame

Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.
-- George Santayana

#Time #Achieve #Form

Habit is stronger than reason.
-- George Santayana

#Smoking #Stronger #Reason

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

#Inspirational #Funny #Men

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.
-- George Santayana

#Imagination #Vivid #Taste

The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.
-- George Santayana

#Spirit #Speak #Longing

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

#Clouds #Air #Wind

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

#Atheist #Men #Insightful

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

#Men #Dignity #Despise

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

#Football #Art #Kindness

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

#Birthday #Passion #Pride

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

#Running #Holiday #Order

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. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.
-- George Santayana

#Change #Children #Persistence

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

#Experience #Conclusion #Draws

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

#Philosophy #Simple #Facts

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

#God #Atheism #Firsts

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
-- George Santayana

#Beauty #Self Esteem #Mean

Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable, precisely, the balance and wisdom that come from long perspectives and broad foundations
-- George Santayana

#Wisdom #Perspective #Long

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
-- George Santayana

#Inspirational #Family #Brother

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.
-- George Santayana

#Inspirational #Common Sense #Common

There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
-- George Santayana

#Sympathy

The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
-- George Santayana

#Voice #Soul #Body

The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
-- George Santayana

#Real #History #Theatre

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

#Women #Different #Reason

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

#Dream #Dreamer

If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.
-- George Santayana

#Artist #Unhappy #Doe

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

#Miracle #Religion #Causes

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

#Life #Motivational #Friendship

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

#Fear #Lying #People

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

#Happiness #Wise #Wisdom

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
-- George Santayana

#Mind #Prejudice #Nimble

Sanity is madness put to good use.
-- George Santayana

#History #Use #Madness

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

#Truth #Freedom #Liberty

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
-- George Santayana

#History #Needs

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

#Friendship #Buddhist #Men

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

#Happiness #Laughter #Mad

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.
-- George Santayana

#Real #Interest #Unselfishness

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

#Friendship #People #Mind

The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.
-- George Santayana

#Friendship #World

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

#Design #Individuality #Hobbies

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

#Impossible #Existence

The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again
-- George Santayana

#Doe #Remember

Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.
-- George Santayana

#Dignity #Fixed #Traveler

It is wisdom to believe the heart.
-- George Santayana

#Believe #Heart

Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
-- George Santayana

#Progress #Quality #Speak

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.
-- George Santayana

#Progress #Savages #Improvement

Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
-- George Santayana

#Heaven #Brain #Mind

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

#Humility #Men #Grace

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
-- George Santayana

#Fashion #Ideas #Ominous

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

#Art #Interesting #Effort

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

#Life #Beautiful #Aggravation

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive
-- George Santayana

#Men #Age #Alive

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

#Fashion #Political #Innovation

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
-- George Santayana

#Life #Motivational #History

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

#Education #Ideas #Difficulty

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

#Country #Eye #Knowledge

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

#Inspirational #Goal #Effort

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
-- George Santayana

#Men #Historical #Language

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

#Function #Dear #Adopted

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

#Positive #War #Remembrance

Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.
-- George Santayana

#Vigilance

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal.
-- George Santayana

#Stupidity #Meanness

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

#Hate #Animal #Men

Oaths are the fossils of piety.
-- George Santayana

#Promise #Fossils #Swearing

Better not be a hero than work oneself up into heroism by shouting lies.
-- George Santayana

#Lying #Hero #Shouting

Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it...
-- George Santayana

#Wise #Opposites #Balance

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.
-- George Santayana

#Life #Anxiety #Honor

Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home.
-- George Santayana

#Home #Men #Mind

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

#Character #Past #Order

In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
-- George Santayana

#Beauty #Beautiful #Suggestions

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

#Song #Art #Singing

Man's most serious activity is play.
-- George Santayana

#Men #Playing Games #Play

Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.
-- George Santayana

#Real #Intuition #Criticism