George Santayana Quotes - Famous Quotes by George Santayana
Born: 1863-12-16
Died: 1952-09-26
George Santayana Biography
... everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
- George Santayana
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A child only educated at school is an uneducated child.
- George Santayana
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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
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A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
- George Santayana
More quotations on: [ Nation ] ***
A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.
- George Santayana
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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
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Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
- George Santayana
More quotations on: [ Advertising ] ***
All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
- George Santayana
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Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
- George Santayana
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America is a young country with an old mentality.
- George Santayana
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America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
- George Santayana
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An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
- George Santayana
More quotations on: [ Art ] ***
An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
- George Santayana
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Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
- George Santayana
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Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.
- George Santayana
More quotations on: [ Travel ] ***
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
- George Santayana
More quotations on: [ Old Age ] ***
Culture is on the horns of this dilemma if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.
- George Santayana
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Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
- George Santayana
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For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.
- George Santayana
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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
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Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is.
- George Santayana
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Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another people are friends in spots.
- George Santayana
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Friendship is constant in all other things Save in the office and affairs of love.
- George Santayana
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Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.
- George Santayana
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Happiness is the only sanction of life where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
- George Santayana
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History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
- George Santayana
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I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
- George Santayana
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In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality....The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.
- George Santayana
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Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
- George Santayana
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It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.
- George Santayana
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It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
- George Santayana
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Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
- George Santayana
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Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
- George Santayana
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Love is only half the illusion the lover, but not his love, is deceived.
- George Santayana
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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
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Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
- George Santayana
More quotations on: [ Music ] ***
Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.
- George Santayana
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Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
- George Santayana
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Nothing is so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
- George Santayana
More quotations on: [ Art ] ***
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
- George Santayana
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Our character...is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
- George Santayana
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Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.
- George Santayana
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Thse who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
- George Santayana
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Sanity is a madness put to good use.
- George Santayana
More quotations on: [ Sanity ] ***
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
- George Santayana
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Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
- George Santayana
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Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
- George Santayana
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Society is like the air; necessary to breathe, but insufficient to live on.
- George Santayana
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That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
- George Santayana
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The Bible is literature, not dogma.
- George Santayana
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
- George Santayana
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The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
- George Santayana
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The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.
- George Santayana
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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
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The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
- George Santayana
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The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
- George Santayana
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The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
- George Santayana
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The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
- George Santayana
More quotations on: [ Wisdom ] [ Learning ] ***
The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
- George Santayana
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The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
- George Santayana
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There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
- George Santayana
More quotations on: [ Death ] [ Life ] [ Birth ] ***
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
- George Santayana
More quotations on: [ History ] [ Past ] ***
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
- George Santayana
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Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
- George Santayana
More quotations on: [ Progress ] ***
To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.
- George Santayana
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To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
- George Santayana
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To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
- George Santayana
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To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
- George Santayana
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To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
- George Santayana
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When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
- George Santayana
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Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
- George Santayana
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