Top 477 Quotes & Sayings by George Santayana
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Spanish novelist George Santayana.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
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.
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
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.
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.
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
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.
The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
Sanity is madness put to good use.
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
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.
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
Depression is rage spread thin.
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
Habit is stronger than reason.
The Bible is literature, not dogma.
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
Music is essentially useless, as is life.
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
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.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
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