#ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ NEWRANDOM

George Santayana

George Santayana (December 16, 1863, Madrid - September 26, 1952, Rome), was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist

Update this biography »

click to add your vote (5 votes)

Famous quotes by George Santayana:Sort:PopularA - Z

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.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another people are friends in spots.
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
America is a young country with an old mentality.
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
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.
... everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
A child only educated at school is an uneducated child.
A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.
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.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument its function is to make the worse appear the better.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.
Culture is on the horns of this dilemma if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.
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 enabline it to make its peace with its destiny.
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.
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions their reasons are always different.
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is.
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things: and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is.
Friendship is constant in all other things Save in the office and affairs of love.
Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.
Happiness is the only sanction of life where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality....The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.
Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
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.
It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
Love is only half the illusion the lover, but not his love, is deceived.
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.
Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, not condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.
Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
Music is essentially useless, as life is.
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 is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
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.
Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Thse who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Sanity is a madness put to good use.
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
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.
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.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
Society is like the air; necessary to breathe, but insufficient to live on.
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
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 world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.
To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
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.

Missing a quote of George Santayana?

Know another good quote of George Santayana? Don't keep it to yourself!

The Web's Largest Resource for

Famous Quotes & Sayings

A Member Of The STANDS4 Network