Top 477 Quotes & Sayings by George Santayana - Page 2
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Spanish novelist George Santayana.
Last updated on April 22, 2025.
The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
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.
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.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
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.
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
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.
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
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.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
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.
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
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.
A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
America is a young country with an old mentality.
The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
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.
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
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.
Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
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.
For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
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.
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
A country without a memory is a country of madmen.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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