George Santayana Quotes
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Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.
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Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.
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The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
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Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
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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.
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Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything.
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It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.
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Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.
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In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
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O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies; To trust the soul's invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art.
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Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
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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.
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Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view; as to knowing her through and through; that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
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A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.
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Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
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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.
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It is a great bond to dislike the same things.
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History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
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Music is essentially useless, as life is; but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
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Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair.
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I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.
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The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence
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Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
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When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.
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To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.
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Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.
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I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.
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There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
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George Santayana
- Born: December 16, 1863
- Died: September 26, 1952
- Occupation: Philosopher
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