A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
- George Santayana Quote
A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
- George Santayana Quote
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 Quote
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
- George Santayana Quote
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 Quote
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
- George Santayana Quote
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
- George Santayana Quote
America is a young country with an old mentality.
- George Santayana Quote
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
- George Santayana Quote
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
- George Santayana Quote
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
- George Santayana Quote
Depression is rage spread thin.
- George Santayana Quote
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 Quote
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
- George Santayana Quote
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
- George Santayana Quote
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
- George Santayana Quote
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
- George Santayana Quote
For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.
- George Santayana Quote
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
- George Santayana Quote
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 Quote
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.
- George Santayana Quote
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
- George Santayana Quote
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
- George Santayana Quote
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
- George Santayana Quote
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
- George Santayana Quote
In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
- George Santayana Quote
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
- George Santayana Quote
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
- George Santayana Quote
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
- George Santayana Quote
It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.
- George Santayana Quote
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
- George Santayana Quote
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
- George Santayana Quote
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
- George Santayana Quote
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
- George Santayana Quote
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
- George Santayana Quote
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
- George Santayana Quote
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
- George Santayana Quote
Music is essentially useless, as is life.
- George Santayana Quote
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
- George Santayana Quote
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
- George Santayana Quote
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
- George Santayana Quote
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
- George Santayana Quote
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
- George Santayana Quote
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
- George Santayana Quote
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
- George Santayana Quote
Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
- George Santayana Quote
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
- George Santayana Quote
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
- George Santayana Quote
Sanity is a madness put to good use.
- George Santayana Quote
Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
- George Santayana Quote
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
- George Santayana Quote
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
- George Santayana Quote
The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.
- George Santayana Quote
The Bible is literature, not dogma.
- George Santayana Quote
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
- George Santayana Quote
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
- George Santayana Quote
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
- George Santayana Quote
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
- George Santayana Quote
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
- George Santayana Quote
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
- George Santayana Quote
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
- George Santayana Quote
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
- George Santayana Quote
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 Quote
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
- George Santayana Quote
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
- George Santayana Quote
The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
- George Santayana Quote
The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
- George Santayana Quote
The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
- George Santayana Quote
The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
- George Santayana Quote
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
- George Santayana Quote
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
- George Santayana Quote
The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
- George Santayana Quote
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
- George Santayana Quote
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.
- George Santayana Quote
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
- George Santayana Quote
There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.
- George Santayana Quote
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
- George Santayana Quote
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
- George Santayana Quote
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
- George Santayana Quote
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 Quote
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
- George Santayana Quote
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
- George Santayana Quote
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
- George Santayana Quote
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 Quote
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
- George Santayana Quote
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
- George Santayana Quote
