George Santayana > Quotes

“Sanity is a madness put to good uses.”
― George Santayana , The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings

“Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.”
― George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Five Volumes in One

“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.”
― George Santayana

“A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”
― George Santayana

“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.”
― George Santayana, Soliloquies in England & Later Soliloquies

“To be interested in the changing seasons is . . . a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.”
― George Santayana

“Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.”
― George Santayana

“To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.”
― George Santayana

“There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.”
― George Santayana

“Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”
― George Santayana

“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”
― George Santayana

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
― George Santayana, Soliloquies in England & Later Soliloquies

“Memory... is an internal rumor.”
― George Santayana

“Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.”
― Santayana

“Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.”
― 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

“Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.”
― George Santayana

“The wisest mind has something yet to learn.”
― George Santayana

“Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.”
― George Santayana

“Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”
― George Santayana

“love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.”
― George Santayana

“There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.”
― George Santayana

“To know your future you must know your past”
― George Santayana

“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”
― George Santayana

“We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”
― George Santayana

“Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”
― George Santayana

“To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.”
― George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory

“Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.”
― George Santayana

“The bible is literature, not dogma.”
― George Santayana

“The muffled syllables that Nature speaks
Fill us with deeper longing for her word;
She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,
She makes a sweeter music than is heard.”
― George Santayana