Top 477 Quotes & Sayings by George Santayana - Page 3

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

Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable, precisely, the balance and wisdom that come from long perspectives and broad foundations

Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age

Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.

Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.

Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.

If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.

It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.

Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.

Man's most serious activity is play.

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panza's who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixote's with a sense for ideals, but mad.

Man is not made to understand life, but to live it.

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect...

The earth has music for those who listen.

Happiness is impossible, and even inconceivable, to a mind without scope and without pause, a mind driven by craving, pleasure, or fear. To be happy, you must be reasonable, or you must be tamed. You must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world and what things in it can really serve you. To be happy, you must be wise.

The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence

In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality....The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive

Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.

Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument, its function is to make the worse appear the better article. A confused competition of all propagandas -- those insults to human nature -- is carried on by the most expert psychological methods -- for instance, by always repeating a lie.

Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.

Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.

There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.

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

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

We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.

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.

To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.

The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.

The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.

It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.

Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.

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

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal.

It is wisdom to believe the heart.

If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on first, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the parts known give us evidence enough that the unknown parts cannot be much amiss.

Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.

Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.

To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.

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

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer; there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.

Memory itself is an internal rumour.

Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.

The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.

Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.