Santayana Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Santayana
Santayana Quotes & Sayings
Happy to read and share the best inspirational Santayana quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
— George Santayana
The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.
— George Santayana
I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life; I should not be honest otherwise.
— George Santayana
The living have never shown me how to live.
— George Santayana
Guard you thoughts as you would your wallet.
Habit is stronger than reason. — George Santayana
Habit is stronger than reason. — George Santayana
Santayana's aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.
— Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
— George Santayana
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
— George Santayana
I have no axe to grind; only my thoughts to burnish.
— George Santayana
For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.
— George Santayana
Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
— George Santayana
Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.
— George Santayana
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
— George Santayana
The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again
— George Santayana
The man who is not permitted to own is owned.
— George Santayana
Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.
— George Santayana
The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.
— George Santayana
Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.
— George Santayana
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
— George Santayana
Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
— George Santayana
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
— George Santayana
A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
— George Santayana
If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
— 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
To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.
— George Santayana
Love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.
— George Santayana
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
— George Santayana
The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
— George Santayana
Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
— George Santayana
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
— George Santayana
All beauties are to be honored, but only one embraced.
— George Santayana
Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
— George Santayana
Criticism surprises the soul in the arms of convention.
— George Santayana
Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.
— George Santayana
The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.
— George Santayana
Man is not made to understand life, but to live it.
— George Santayana
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
— George Santayana
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
— George Santayana
Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.
— George Santayana
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
— George Santayana
The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.
— 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 family is one of nature's masterpieces.
— George Santayana
Sanity is madness put to good use.
— George Santayana
The earth has its music for those who will listen
— Reginald Vincent Holmes
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
— George Santayana
Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
— George Santayana
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
— George Santayana
The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger.
— George Santayana
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
— George Santayana
Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.
— George Santayana
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
— George Santayana
There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.
— George Santayana
What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.
— George Santayana
The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.
— George Santayana
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
— George Santayana
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
— George Santayana
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
— George Santayana
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
— George Santayana
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
— George Santayana
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.
— George Santayana
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
— George Santayana
Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
— George Santayana
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
Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.
— George Santayana
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
Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
— George Santayana
Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.
— George Santayana
Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair.
— George Santayana
Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely a vehicle for joy.
— George Santayana
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
— George Santayana
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
— George Santayana
The worship of power is an old religion.
— George Santayana
The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
— George Santayana
If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.
— George Santayana
The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.
— George Santayana
A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.
— George Santayana
The bible is literature, not dogma.
— George Santayana
It is a great bond to dislike the same things.
— George Santayana
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.
— George Santayana
The body must be loosely clad if the mind is to forget it and impetuously lead its own life.
— George Santayana
In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
— George Santayana
All conditions are bearable, all dignities trumpery, and wisdom simply the gift of making the best of whatever is thrust upon us.
— 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
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
— George Santayana
As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends.
— George Santayana
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
— George Santayana
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.
— George Santayana
It is the acme of life to understand life.
— George Santayana
Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them.
— George Santayana
There is no right government except good government.
— George Santayana
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
— George Santayana
America is a young country with an old mentality.
— George Santayana
Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.
— George Santayana
The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.
— George Santayana
In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else
— George Santayana
It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.
— George Santayana
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
— George Santayana
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
— George Santayana