Top 100 Santayana Quotes
#1. Santayana's aphorism must be reversed: too often it is those who can remember the past who are condemned to repeat it.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
#2. Santayana ... reasoned that the young men who were being killed in the war would die anyhow sooner or later, and would be good for nothing while they lived.
Bertrand Russell
#3. Since we think about ourselves so much of the time, it is comforting to assume ... that we really know the score ... [But] this is not an easy assignment. [As] Santayana wrote, 'Nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see one's equation written out.'
Gordon Allport
#4. For you cannot live in New York City very long and not be conscious of the niceties of being rich - the city is, after all, an ecstatic exercise in merchandising - and one evening of his visit to Venezuela Sutherland sat straight up when he read a line of Santayana's: Money is the petrol of life.
Andrew Holleran
#5. What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak. George Santayana, Spanish philosopher
Anonymous
#6. Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
George Santayana
#7. Does the thoughtful man suppose that ... the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?
George Santayana
#8. There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar and anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce stupidity. Such a headless people has the mind of a worm and the claws of a dragon.
George Santayana
#9. The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.
George Santayana
#11. The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
George Santayana
#13. It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.
George Santayana
#16. Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
George Santayana
#18. A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.
George Santayana
#19. The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.
George Santayana
#20. Work and love these are the basics; waking life is a dream controlled.
George Santayana
#21. The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms.
George Santayana
#22. Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.
George Santayana
#24. Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
George Santayana
#25. Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.
George Santayana
#26. It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility
George Santayana
#27. Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.
George Santayana
#28. Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.
George Santayana
#30. Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.
George Santayana
#34. Until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.
George Santayana
#35. What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.
George Santayana
#37. 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
#38. Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked.
George Santayana
#39. Each religion necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself. Religions, like languages, are necessary rivals. What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
George Santayana
#41. What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?
George Santayana
#42. It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.
George Santayana
#43. The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
George Santayana
#44. Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.
George Santayana
#45. It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
George Santayana
#46. A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.
George Santayana
#47. There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor's chair.
George Santayana
#48. 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
#49. An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
George Santayana
#52. Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.
George Santayana
#53. 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
#54. In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else
George Santayana
#56. Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.
George Santayana
#57. 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
#58. One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.
George Santayana
#59. The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.
George Santayana
#60. Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.
George Santayana
#61. Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
George Santayana
#62. Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.
George Santayana
#63. The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
George Santayana
#64. That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
George Santayana
#65. Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home.
George Santayana
#66. The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
George Santayana
#67. There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.
George Santayana
#69. I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life; I should not be honest otherwise.
George Santayana
#71. If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
George Santayana
#72. Sometimes we have to change the truth in order to remember it.
George Santayana
#73. A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.
George Santayana
#74. 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
#75. Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.
George Santayana
#77. To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
George Santayana
#78. America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
George Santayana
#79. The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.
George Santayana
#80. Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival; they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, Please strike here!
George Santayana
#81. I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.
George Santayana
#82. A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.
George Santayana
#85. Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
George Santayana
#86. The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.
George Santayana
#87. The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
George Santayana
#89. Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.
George Santayana
#90. A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.
George Santayana
#91. Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
George Santayana
#92. The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.
George Santayana
#93. Why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.
George Santayana
#95. What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like?
George Santayana
#96. So in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being known how to touch it. That being is not selected but recognized and obeyed.
George Santayana
#97. The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad.
George Santayana
#98. 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
#99. Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
George Santayana
#100. Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.
George Santayana
