“Sanity is a madness put to good uses.”
― George Santayana
“Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.”
― George Santayana
“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
“A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”
― George Santayana
“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.”
― George Santayana
“To be interested in the changing seasons is . . . a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.”
― George Santayana
“Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.”
― George Santayana
“To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.”
― George Santayana
“There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.”
― George Santayana
“Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”
― George Santayana
“Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.”
― Santayana
“Memory… is an internal rumor.”
― George Santayana
“Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.”
― George Santayana
“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”
― George Santayana
“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
― George Santayana
“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.”
― George Santayana
“Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.”
― George Santayana
“The wisest mind has something yet to learn.”
― George Santayana
“Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.”
― George Santayana
“Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”
― George Santayana
“love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.”
― George Santayana
“To know your future you must know your past”
― George Santayana
“We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”
― George Santayana
“Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.”
― George Santayana
“To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.”
― George Santayana
“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”
― George Santayana
“There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.”
― George Santayana
“The bible is literature, not dogma.”
― George Santayana
“The muffled syllables that Nature speaks
Fill us with deeper longing for her word;
She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,
She makes a sweeter music than is heard.”
― George Santayana
“A man’s feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.”
― George Santayana
“The worship of power is an old religion.”
― George Santayana
“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”
― George Santayana
“With you a part of me hath passed away;
For in the peopled forest of my mind
A tree made leafless by this wintry wind
Shall never don again its green array.
Chapel and fireside, country road and bay,
Have something of their friendliness resigned;
Another, if I would, I could not find,
And I am grown much older in a day.
But yet I treasure in my memory
Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease,
And the dear honour of your amity;
For these once mine, my life is rich with these.
And I scarce know which part may greater be,–
What I keep of you, or you rob from me.”
― George Santayana
“History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there. . . . History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten”
― George Santayana
“The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.”
― George Santayana
“An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.”
― George Santayana
“The earth has its music for those who will listen.”
― George Santayana
“Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.”
― George Santayana
“I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.”
― George Santayana
“The earth has music for those who listen.”
― George Santayana
“Scepticism 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
“why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.”
― George Santayana
“Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.”
― Santayana, George
“Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
― George Santayana
“The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests.”
― George Santayana
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.”
― George Santayana
“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
“That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.”
― 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 man who is not permitted to own is owned.”
― George Santayana