George Santayana's Quotes

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

George Santayana

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

George Santayana

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.

George Santayana

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

George Santayana

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

George Santayana

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

George Santayana

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

George Santayana

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

George Santayana

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.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

George Santayana

The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.

George Santayana

Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

George Santayana

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

George Santayana

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

George Santayana

Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

George Santayana

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.

George Santayana

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

George Santayana

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

George Santayana

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

George Santayana

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

George Santayana

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.

George Santayana

It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.

George Santayana

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana