Top 100 George Santayana Quotes
#1. It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.
George Santayana
#2. Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
George Santayana
#4. Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.
George Santayana
#5. Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked.
George Santayana
#7. It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.
George Santayana
#8. A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.
George Santayana
#9. There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor's chair.
George Santayana
#10. By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
George Santayana
#11. An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
George Santayana
#12. 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
#14. Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.
George Santayana
#15. The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
George Santayana
#16. The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
George Santayana
#17. There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.
George Santayana
#19. A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.
George Santayana
#20. Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.
George Santayana
#22. I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.
George Santayana
#23. The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.
George Santayana
#25. What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like?
George Santayana
#26. 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.
George Santayana
#27. We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.
George Santayana
#28. The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger.
George Santayana
#29. Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
George Santayana
#30. Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
#31. A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
George Santayana
#32. Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair.
George Santayana
#33. The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
George Santayana
#34. The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
George Santayana
#35. The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.
George Santayana
#36. Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.
George Santayana
#37. There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana
#38. What is the part of wisdom? To dream with one eye open; to be detatched from the world without being hostile to it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings, without forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are.
George Santayana
#40. Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
George Santayana
#41. The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
George Santayana
#42. Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
George Santayana
#43. Love is at once more animal than friendship and more divine ...
George Santayana
#45. Guard you thoughts as you would your wallet.
Habit is stronger than reason.
George Santayana
#46. Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
George Santayana
#47. Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.
George Santayana
#49. To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.
George Santayana
#51. To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of its content.
George Santayana
#52. Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
George Santayana
#53. Scepticism 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.
George Santayana
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
George Santayana
#57. Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.
George Santayana
#60. Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.
George Santayana
#61. Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.
George Santayana
#62. 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
#63. My soul hates the fool whose only passion is to live by rule.
George Santayana
#64. Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
George Santayana
#65. 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
#66. People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.
George Santayana
#67. The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine ... If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is the spirit.
George Santayana
#68. Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
George Santayana
#69. Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.
George Santayana
#70. To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.
George Santayana
#71. The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.
George Santayana
#73. The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
George Santayana
#74. In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.
George Santayana
#75. Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.
George Santayana
#76. The body must be loosely clad if the mind is to forget it and impetuously lead its own life.
George Santayana
#77. Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals, whereas with us the intervals are all.
George Santayana
#78. The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
George Santayana
#79. Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.
George Santayana
#80. Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
George Santayana
#81. Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center.
George Santayana
#82. The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests.
George Santayana
#83. Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life.
George Santayana
#85. What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art .
George Santayana
#86. The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.
George Santayana
#87. Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.
George Santayana
#88. Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They may all collapse altogether.
George Santayana
#89. Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.
George Santayana
#90. Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.
George Santayana
#93. He seems indeed to have been a man of exceptional kindness and amiability,
George Santayana
#94. To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and aesthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so.
George Santayana
#96. The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
George Santayana
#98. Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
George Santayana
#99. To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
George Santayana
#100. Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.
George Santayana
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