George Santayana Quotes & Wallpapers

Total Quotes: 556

Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes. George Santayana

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

Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful. George Santayana

Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them. George Santayana

We do right enough darling, if we go wrong together. George Santayana

Docility is the observable half of reason. George Santayana

We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere. George Santayana

You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete sceptic or idealist, but a realist at heart. So long as he is alive his sincere philosophy must fulfil the assumptions of his life and not destroy him. George Santayana

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

Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion. George Santayana

I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness. George Santayana

Those who cannot remember the pastare condemned to repeat it. or: Those who have never heard of good system development practice are condemned to reinvent it. George Santayana

A simple life is its own reward. George Santayana

Memory... is an internal rumor. George Santayana

For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing. George Santayana

Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture. George Santayana

The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding. George Santayana

Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice. George Santayana

There is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made us ashamed of ourselves when it was happening: there is a pleasant panoramic sense of what it all was and how it all had to be. Why, if we are not vain or snobbish, need we desire that it should have been different? The better things we missed may yet be enjoyed or attained by someone else somewhere: why isn't that just as good? And there is no regret, either, in the sense of wishing the past to return, or missing it: it is quite real enough as it is, there at its own date and place George Santayana

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others. George Santayana

Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention. George Santayana

I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world. George Santayana

A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within. George Santayana

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad. George Santayana

Mortality has its compensations: one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come. George Santayana

It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility. George Santayana

The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence. George Santayana

Words are weapons, and it is dangerous... to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy. George Santayana

A country without a memory is a country of madmen. George Santayana

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

The highest form of vanity is love of fame. George Santayana

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

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness. George Santayana

Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing. George Santayana

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. George Santayana

A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. George Santayana

There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself. George Santayana

Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be. George Santayana

Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works. George Santayana

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana

Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses. George Santayana

Philosophers are as jealous as woman; each wants a monopoly of praise. George Santayana

People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them. George Santayana

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. George Santayana

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. George Santayana

A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths. George Santayana

My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable. George Santayana

The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice. George Santayana

An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity. George Santayana

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

Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace. George Santayana

. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play. George Santayana

Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods. George Santayana

America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences. George Santayana

The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness, and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought. George Santayana

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experience. George Santayana

To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. George Santayana

Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see? George Santayana

The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence. George Santayana

Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things. George Santayana

Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence. George Santayana

All spiritual interests are supported by animal life. George Santayana

What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values. George Santayana

The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family. George Santayana

Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo, The Last Puritan, and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age, I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure, more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. 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. George Santayana

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 George Santayana

It is wisdom to believe the heart. George Santayana

Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt. George Santayana

Sometimes we have to change the truth in order to remember it. George Santayana

They are condemned, Dante tells us, to no other penalty than to live in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of life. George Santayana

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