George Santayana Quotes
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.
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.
Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.
The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.
Nothing you can lose by dying is half as precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility.
I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavour to understand him.
Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.
We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.
The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.
What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art .
Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.
Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.
Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.
A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.
Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.
Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
People who feel themselves to be exiles in this world are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.
