110 Quotes & Sayings By George Santayana

George Santayana was an American philosopher, poet, essayist, novelist, and literary critic. He was also a professor of philosophy at Harvard University. Santayana is best known for his philosophical work "Scepticism" (1905), in which he examines the limits of human knowledge, in particular the problem of induction in science. His views on the importance of experience in interpreting reality stand in opposition to those of logical positivism, especially in his argument that metaphysical claims cannot be tested by reason alone.

Love make us poets, and the approach of death should...
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Love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers. George Santayana
The worship of power is an old religion.
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The worship of power is an old religion. George Santayana
To be happy you must have taken the measure of...
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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
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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. George Santayana
There is no cure for birth and death save to...
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There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval George Santayana
The fact of having been born is a bad augury...
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The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality. George Santayana
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With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be, -- What I keep of you, or you rob from me. . George Santayana
The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper...
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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
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Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana
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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
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Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence. George Santayana
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Consciousness is a born hermit. George Santayana
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The earth has its music for those who will listen. George Santayana
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The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its total temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition; and candor and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost. George Santayana
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Music is essentially useless, as life is. George Santayana
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That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions. George Santayana
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Depression is rage spread thin. George Santayana
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The wisest mind hath something yet to learn. George Santayana
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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
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The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive. George Santayana
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The man who is not permitted to own is owned. George Santayana
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Sanity is a madness put to good uses. George Santayana
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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. George Santayana
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There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. George Santayana
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Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions, their reasons are always different. George Santayana
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There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval. George Santayana
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To knock a thing down especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle is a deep delight to the blood. George Santayana
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Wisdom comes by disillusionment. George Santayana
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Before you contradict an old man my fair friend you should endeavour to understand him. George Santayana
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Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo The Last Puritan and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure. . George Santayana
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Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles. George Santayana
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If artists and poets are unhappy it is after all because happiness does not interest them. George Santayana
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An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there. George Santayana
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Art is a delayed echo. George Santayana
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Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable what it is or what it means can never be said. George Santayana
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In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity. George Santayana
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The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity. George Santayana
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Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists. George Santayana
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There is nothing to which men while they have food and drink cannot reconcile themselves. George Santayana
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Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die which is man's charter of nobility. George Santayana
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A child educated only at school is an uneducated child. George Santayana
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England is the paradise of individuality eccentricity heresy anomalies hobbies and humours. George Santayana
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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
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Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another people are friends in spots. George Santayana
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One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human. George Santayana
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To cement a new friendship especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person and cut across the accidents of place and time. George Santayana
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It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on without enquiry and almost at first sight the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends the part known gives us evidence enough that the unknown part cannot be much amiss. George Santayana
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Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others. George Santayana
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Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium of custom of inertia it is by no means a representative of reason. George Santayana
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There is nothing sacred about convention there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself. George Santayana
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Habit is stronger than reason. George Santayana
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Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness. George Santayana
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I believe in the possibility of happiness if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions including optimism. George Santayana
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Happiness is the only sanction of life where happiness fails existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment. George Santayana
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Happiness is the only sanction in life where happiness fails existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment. George Santayana
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana
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It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility. George Santayana
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Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence. George Santayana
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For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned. George Santayana
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Every real object must cease to be what it seemed and none could ever be what the whole soul desired. George Santayana
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Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway. George Santayana
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It is wisdom to believe the heart. George Santayana
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There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. George Santayana
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By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond man's power to answer do not occur to him at all. George Santayana
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Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. George Santayana
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Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public. George Santayana
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Prayer among sane people has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end. George Santayana
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Progress far from consisting in change depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are content to repeat it. George Santayana
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Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament. George Santayana
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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. George Santayana
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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
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Work and love - these are the basics waking life is a dream controlled. George Santayana
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If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics. George Santayana
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Science is nothing but developed perception interpreted intent common sense rounded out and minutely articulated. George Santayana
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If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation. George Santayana
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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
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Before he sets out the traveller must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel. If he drifted aimlessly from country to country he would not travel but only wander ramble as a tramp. The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere so his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations. George Santayana
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The truth is cruel but it can be loved and it makes free those who have loved it. George Santayana
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Almost every wise saying has an opposite one no less wise to balance it. George Santayana
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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
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The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it. George Santayana
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Only the dead have seen the end of the war. George Santayana
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The family is one of nature's masterpieces. George Santayana
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To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. George Santayana
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I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads. George Santayana
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Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts. George Santayana
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It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss volatile spirits prefer unhappiness. George Santayana
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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. George Santayana
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Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are. George Santayana
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Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace. George Santayana
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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. George Santayana
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Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth. George Santayana
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Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different. George Santayana
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When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different. George Santayana
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Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana
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History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there. George Santayana
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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. George Santayana
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Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them. George Santayana
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The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings. George Santayana
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To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman. George Santayana