George Santayana

It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.

— George Santayana

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

— George Santayana

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.

— George Santayana

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

— George Santayana

America is a young country with an old mentality.

— George Santayana

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

— George Santayana

Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.

— George Santayana

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.

— George Santayana

Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.

— George Santayana

The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.

— George Santayana

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.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.

— George Santayana

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

— George Santayana

The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.

— George Santayana

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

— George Santayana

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

— George Santayana

The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

— George Santayana

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

— George Santayana

Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.

— George Santayana

Habit is stronger than reason.

— George Santayana

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.

— George Santayana

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.

— George Santayana

Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.

— George Santayana

Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

— George Santayana

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

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

— George Santayana

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.

— George Santayana

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.

— George Santayana

The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.

— George Santayana

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

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

— George Santayana

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

— George Santayana

Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited.

— George Santayana

If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.

— George Santayana

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.

— George Santayana

Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

— George Santayana

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.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.

— George Santayana

Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.

— George Santayana

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

— George Santayana

Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.

— George Santayana

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.

— George Santayana

There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.

— George Santayana

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

— George Santayana

Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.

— George Santayana

Oaths are the fossils of piety.

— George Santayana

There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.

— George Santayana

The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.

— George Santayana

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

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.

— George Santayana

The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

— George Santayana

The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.

— George Santayana

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

— George Santayana

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

— George Santayana

Every actual animal is somewhat dull and somewhat mad. He will at times miss his signals and stare vacantly when he might well act, while at other times he will run off into convulsions and raise a dust in his own brain to no purpose. These imperfections are so human that we should hardly recognise ourselves if we could shake them off altogether. Not to retain any dulness would mean to possess untiring attention and universal interests, thus realising the boast about deeming nothing human alien to us; while to be absolutely without folly would involve perfect self-knowledge and self-control. The intelligent man known to history flourishes within a dullard and holds a lunatic in leash. He is encased in a protective shell of ignorance and insensibility which keeps him from being exhausted and confused by this too complicated world; but that integument blinds him at the same time to many of his nearest and highest interests. He is amused by the antics of the brute dreaming within his breast; he gloats on his passionate reveries, an amusement which sometimes costs him very dear. Thus the best human intelligence is still decidely barbarous; it fights in heavy armour and keeps a fool at court.

— George Santayana

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience.

— George Santayana

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

— George Santayana