George Santayana Quotes

The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.

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

It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.

In any close society it is more urgent to restrain others than to be free oneself. Hence the tendency for the central authority to absorb and supersede such as are local or delegated.

Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.

Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.

Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.

Columbus found a world, and had no chart save one that Faith deciphered in the skies.

Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.

I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.

It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.

Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.

There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.

Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.

In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

... so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected; it is recognised and obeyed.

All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.

The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.

The unforgivable sin is the refusal to pardon.

The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.

Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.

As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends.

The sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a vehicle for things.

People who feel themselves to be exiles in this world are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.

Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely a vehicle for joy.

The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.

Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.

He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

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

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

Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.

For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.

To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.

Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They all may collapse altogether.

The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.

Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.

There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.

A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.

In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.

The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor's chair.

My soul hates the fool whose only passion is to live by rule.