Top 66 George Santayana Quotes

If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.

Depression is rage spread thin.

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

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

The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.

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

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

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

Sanity is madness put to good use.

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.

Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.

Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.

America is a young country with an old mentality.

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

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

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

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

The Soul is the voice of the body’s interests.

The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

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

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.

The spirit’s foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

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

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

Habit is stronger than reason.

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

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

Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

By nature‘s kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man’s power to answer do not occur to him at all.

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

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.

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.

Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.

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

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

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

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.

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

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

Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

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

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

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.

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

A man’s feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.