George Santayana Quotes

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

~ George Santayana

Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.

~ George Santayana

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

~ George Santayana

Work and love - these are the basics waking life is a dream controlled.

~ George Santayana

If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

~ George Santayana

If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.

~ George Santayana

Before he sets out the traveller must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel. If he drifted aimlessly from country to country he would not travel but only wander ramble as a tramp. The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere so his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.

~ 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

The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.

~ George Santayana

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

~ George Santayana

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

~ 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

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

~ George Santayana

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

~ 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

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

~ George Santayana

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

~ George Santayana

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.

~ George Santayana

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

~ George Santayana

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

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

~ George Santayana

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

~ George Santayana

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

~ George Santayana

Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

~ George Santayana

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

~ George Santayana

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

~ George Santayana

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

~ George Santayana

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

~ George Santayana

Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.

~ George Santayana

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

~ George Santayana

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

~ George Santayana

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

~ George Santayana

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

~ George Santayana

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

~ George Santayana

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

~ George Santayana

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

~ George Santayana

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

~ George Santayana