George Santayana Quotes
The world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes.
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.
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.
Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.
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.
Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.
Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
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.
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
Music is essentially useless, as life is; but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
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.
Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.
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.
If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.
To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
In this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express; the choice lies between a mask and a figleaf.
