George santayana quotes

Depression is rage spread thin.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

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

Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine That lights the pathway but one step ahead Across a void of mystery and dread.

Beauty is objectified pleasure.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

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

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.

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

Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.

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

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.

The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.

Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.

If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.

Work and love these are the basics; waking life is a dream controlled.

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

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar and anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce stupidity. Such a headless people has the mind of a worm and the claws of a dragon.

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

He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

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.

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

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

Habit is stronger than reason.

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

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.

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.

The earth has music for those who listen.

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

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.

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

Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked.

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

Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act wisely.

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive

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

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

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

Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.

Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument, its function is to make the worse appear the better article. A confused competition of all propagandas -- those insults to human nature -- is carried on by the most expert psychological methods -- for instance, by always repeating a lie.

The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.

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

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.

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

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect...

A simple life is its own reward.

To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

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.

Man is not made to understand life, but to live it.

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.

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

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

It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.

The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They all may collapse altogether.

People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.

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.

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.

Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.

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

Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panza's who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixote's with a sense for ideals, but mad.

Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.

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

Sanity is madness put to good use.

It is wisdom to believe the heart.

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

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

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

Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.

There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.

Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.

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

It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.

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.

To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.

A country without a memory is a country of madmen.

Memory itself is an internal rumour.

Man's most serious activity is play.

The unforgivable sin is the refusal to pardon.

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

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

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

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.

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

I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.

Each religion necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself. Religions, like languages, are necessary rivals. What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

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

Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.

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

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.

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

Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age

Happiness is impossible, and even inconceivable, to a mind without scope and without pause, a mind driven by craving, pleasure, or fear. To be happy, you must be reasonable, or you must be tamed. You must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world and what things in it can really serve you. To be happy, you must be wise.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything.

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

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

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

Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.

The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.

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.

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

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.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.