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George Santayana [1863-1952] Spanish

Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known in English as George Santayana, was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist.

Knowledge, Men, Religion, Wisdom, Friendship, Happiness, History, Nature, Science, Women, Art, Beauty, Best, Courage, Death, Design, Dreams, Education, Experience, Family, Future, Great, Home, Hope, Imagination, Intelligence, Patience, Patriotism, Peace, Positive, Respect, Truth, War

Quote	Tags	Rank
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.	Family, Nature	101
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.	History	102
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.	Men, Women	103
Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.	Best, Men	104
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.		105
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.	Education, Experience, Great	106
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.	Friendship	107
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.	Patriotism	108
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.	Wisdom	109
In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.	Men	110
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.	War	111
Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.	Peace, Religion	112
To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.		113
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.		114
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.	Design	115
Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.		116
Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.	Knowledge	117
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.		118
The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.		119
It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.		120
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.		121
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.	Women	122
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.	Wisdom	123
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.		124
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.		125
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.	Happiness	126
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.		201
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.	Home, Patience	202
Depression is rage spread thin.		203
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.		204
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.	Dreams, Truth	205
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.		206
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.	Art	207
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.	Nature	208
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.		209
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.	Future, Respect	210
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.		211
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.		212
The Bible is literature, not dogma.		213
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.	Courage, Religion	214
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.		215
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.	Knowledge	216
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.		217
The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.		218
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.	Happiness	219
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.		220
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.	Death	221
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.		222
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.		223
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.	Beauty	224
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.	Hope	225
Oaths are the fossils of piety.		226
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.	Positive	301
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.	Intelligence	302
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.		303
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.	History	304
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.		305
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.		306
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.		307
If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.		308
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.		309
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.	Religion	310
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.	Science	311
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.	Wisdom	312
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.		313
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.		314
Habit is stronger than reason.		315
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.	Knowledge	316
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.		317
A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.		318
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.		319
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.		320
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.	Friendship	321
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.	Science	322
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.		323
All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.		324
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.		325
The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.		326
Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.		401
America is a young country with an old mentality.		402
The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.		403
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.		404
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.		405
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.		406
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.		407
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.		408
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.		409
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.		410
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.		411
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.		412
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.	Imagination	413
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.		414
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.		415
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.		416
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.		417
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.		418
It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.		419
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.		420
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.		421
For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.		422
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.		423
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.		424
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.		425
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.		426
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.		501
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.		502
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.		503
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.		504
Music is essentially useless, as is life.		505
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.		506
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.		507
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.		508
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.		509
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.		510
Sanity is madness put to good use.		511
It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.		512
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.		513
Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.		514

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