George Santayana Quotes
In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.
The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
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.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
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.
Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
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.
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
