Words matter. These are the best George Santayana Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
Sanity is madness put to good use.
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
America is a young country with an old mentality.
Depression is rage spread thin.
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
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.
I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
The Bible is literature, not dogma.
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
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.
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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.
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.
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.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
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.
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
Habit is stronger than reason.
Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
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.
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
Music is essentially useless, as is life.
