George Santayana Quotes

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable, what it is or what it means can never be said.

~ George Santayana

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

~ George Santayana

The worship of power is an old religion.

~ 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

The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.

~ 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

The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill 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

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

~ 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

Consciousness is a born hermit.

~ George Santayana

The earth has its music for those who will listen.

~ George Santayana

The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its total temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition; and candor and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost.

~ 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

Depression is rage spread thin.

~ 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 best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.

~ George Santayana

The man who is not permitted to own is owned.

~ George Santayana

I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life, I should not be honest otherwise.

~ George Santayana

Sanity is a madness put to good uses.

~ George Santayana

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.

~ George Santayana

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

~ 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

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

~ George Santayana

If artists and poets are unhappy it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

~ George Santayana

An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.

~ George Santayana

Art is a delayed echo.

~ George Santayana

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.

~ George Santayana

Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die which is man's charter of nobility.

~ George Santayana

England is the paradise of individuality eccentricity heresy anomalies hobbies and humours.

~ George Santayana

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another people are friends in spots.

~ George Santayana

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.

~ George Santayana

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

~ 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

Habit is stronger than reason.

~ George Santayana

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.

~ George Santayana

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

~ George Santayana

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

~ George Santayana

Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.

~ George Santayana

Habit is stronger than reason.

~ George Santayana

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

~ George Santayana