George Santayana (1863-1952)

Quotes

• 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.