George Santayana Quotes

It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.

A friend's only gift is himself.

Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home.

The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.

Love is at once more animal than friendship and more divine.

It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

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

To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of its content.

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

It is one thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagination.

A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.

Guard you thoughts as you would your wallet. Habit is stronger than reason.

Philosophers are as jealous as women; each wants a monopoly of praise.

Columbus gave the world another world.

A musical education is necessary for musical judgement. What most people relish is hardly music; it is rather a drowsy reverie relieved by nervous thrills.

Fear first created the gods.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

Art is a delayed echo.

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

Beauty is objectified pleasure.

Wisdom comes from disillusionment.

There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.

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

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.

The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.

Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.

To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.

A simple life is its own reward.

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

Better not be a hero than work oneself up into heroism by shouting lies.

Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked.

Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.

Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.

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.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.

Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.

All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.

Memory... is an internal rumor.

The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.

Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

Beware of long arguments and long beards.

There is no right government except good government.

It is the acme of life to understand life.

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

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.

Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.

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

The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.

Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.