George Santayana Quotes

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

The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.

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

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

It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.

Guard you thoughts as you would your wallet.
Habit is stronger than reason.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.

The unforgivable sin is the refusal to pardon.

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

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

For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.

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.

Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.

With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

Nothing you can lose by dying is half as precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility.

All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death.

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

So in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being known how to touch it. That being is not selected but recognized and obeyed.

There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor's chair.

Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

Oaths are the fossils of piety.

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

The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.

To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.

The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.

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

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

Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.

It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.

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

There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.

It is wisdom to believe the heart.

Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.

We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.

By obedience and self-control come to your full stature; be in fact what you are in possibility; satisfy

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs.

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

It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.

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

Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.

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

Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.

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

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

It is one thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagination.

Consciousness is a born hermit.

Love is at once more animal than friendship and more divine ...

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

He described what he knew best or had heard most, and felt he had described the universe. (on Hegel)

The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.

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

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.

What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.

The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.

Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.

All beauties are to be honored, but only one embraced.

As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends.

Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.

Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them.

The body must be loosely clad if the mind is to forget it and impetuously lead its own life.

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

In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.

Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely a vehicle for joy.

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

The worship of power is an old religion.

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.

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

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.

The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence

A simple life is its own reward.

It is a great bond to dislike the same things.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

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

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

What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like?

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

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

The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms.

Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.

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

There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.

My soul hates the fool whose only passion is to live by rule.

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.

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

Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.