George Santayana Quotes

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

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.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

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.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.

People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.

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.

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

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.

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.

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

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.

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

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.

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

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

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.

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

Depression is rage spread thin.

Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

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.

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.

A country without a memory is a country of madmen.

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

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.

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

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

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.

In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.

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

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.

A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

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.

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect...