George Santayana

Quotes

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
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.
America is a young country with an old mentality.
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
Society is like the air; necessary to breathe, but insufficient to live on.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
Life is not a spectacle or feast; it is a predicament.
Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved and it makes free those who love it.
If one is the master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time insight into and understanding of many things.
Life is not a spectacle or a feast: it is a predicament.
People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious that that they are true.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
Sanity is a madness put to good use.
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
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.
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
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 degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
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.
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
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.
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.
The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval
Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
Music is essentially useless, as life is.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
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.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
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.
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.
Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves.
The young man who has not wept is a savage,
and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.
Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
A child only educated at school is an uneducated child.
Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.