George Santayana Quotes

The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms.

The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.

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

Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.

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

A fanatical imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel.

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.

Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.

Spirit itself is not human; it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?

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

Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.

To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful.

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

To drink in the spirit of a place you should be not only alone but unhurried.

One real world is enough.

I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.

The living have never shown me how to live.

If clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary matters.

With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

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.

The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.

At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself, or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat.

To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.

The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.

It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.

The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.

All beauties are to be honored, but only one embraced.

In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else

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

Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.

Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life.

It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.

What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?

Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair.

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.

The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.

Consciousness is a born hermit.

Sanity is a madness put to good uses.

The worship of power is an old religion.

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

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.

The earth has its music for those who will listen.

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.

The man who is not permitted to own is owned.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.

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

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