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George Santayana Quotes

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another people are friends in spots.
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
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.
America is a young country with an old mentality.
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.
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
Love is only half the illusion the lover, but not his love, is deceived.
Music is essentially useless, as life is but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
Music is essentially useless, as life is.
Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.
To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.
It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is.
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things: and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is.
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
Skepticism 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.
Skepticism 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.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
Friendship is constant in all other things Save in the office and affairs of love.
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.
The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
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.
Happiness is the only sanction of life where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
A child only educated at school is an uneducated child.
Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.
The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
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.
The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.
It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
Sanity is a madness put to good use.
Society is like the air; necessary to breathe, but insufficient to live on.
An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
Culture is on the horns of this dilemma if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.