110+ George Santayana Quotes On History, Philosophical And Skeptical

George Santayana was a Spanish philosopher, poet, and novelist. He is best known for his aphorism, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." He was an influential figure in the philosophical movement known as American Pragmatism, and his works focus on topics such as skepticism, philosophy of religion, and aesthetics. Following is our collection on famous quotes by George Santayana on history, philosophical, skeptical.

Top 10 George Santayana Quotes

1. Those who cannot remember the pastare condemned to repeat it. or: Those who have never heard of good system development practice are condemned to reinvent it.
2. Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.
3. To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
4. To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
5. Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
6. 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.
7. There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
8. The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
9. 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.
10. Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

George Santayana Image Quotes

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

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are. — George Santayana

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig. — George Santayana

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character. — George Santayana

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth. — George Santayana

George Santayana Short Quotes

• It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
• Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
• Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
• People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.
• Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
• Depression is rage spread thin.
• A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
• When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
• To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
• Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.

George Santayana Quotes About History

The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form. — George Santayana

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. — George Santayana

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there. — George Santayana

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman. — George Santayana

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject. — George Santayana

Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life. — George Santayana

The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history. — George Santayana

A country without a memory is a country of madmen. — George Santayana

The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again — George Santayana

Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see? — George Santayana

George Santayana Quotes About Philosophical

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers. — George Santayana

Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid. — George Santayana

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say. — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also. — George Santayana

Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much. — George Santayana

Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts. — George Santayana

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained. — George Santayana

It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers. — George Santayana

Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths. — George Santayana

George Santayana Quotes About Skeptical

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer. — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily. — George Santayana

There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far. — George Santayana

Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are. — George Santayana

You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete sceptic or idealist, but a realist at heart. So long as he is alive his sincere philosophy must fulfil the assumptions of his life and not destroy him. — George Santayana

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect. — George Santayana

Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act wisely. — George Santayana

George Santayana Quotes About Life

I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world. — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment. — George Santayana

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

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others. — George Santayana

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament. — George Santayana

Work and love these are the basics; waking life is a dream controlled. — George Santayana

What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art . — George Santayana

Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled. — George Santayana

George Santayana Quotes About Mind

Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions. — George Santayana

The wisest mind has something yet to learn. — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots. — George Santayana

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

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation. — George Santayana

The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything. — George Santayana

The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients. — George Santayana

There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar and anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce stupidity. Such a headless people has the mind of a worm and the claws of a dragon. — 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

George Santayana Quotes About World

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world. — George Santayana

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world. — George Santayana

A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity. — George Santayana

In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity. — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world. — George Santayana

If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk. — George Santayana

The world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes. — George Santayana

People who feel themselves to be exiles in this world are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another. — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

George Santayana Quotes About Love

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love. — George Santayana

The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise. — George Santayana

The highest form of vanity is love of fame. — George Santayana

The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art. — George Santayana

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

Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends. — George Santayana

Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home. — George Santayana

Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture. — George Santayana

Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence. — George Santayana

Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods. — George Santayana

George Santayana Quotes About Experience

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them. — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality. — George Santayana

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas. — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities. — George Santayana

Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length. — George Santayana

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experience. — George Santayana

What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word--the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water. — George Santayana

Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification. — George Santayana

George Santayana Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are. — George Santayana

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer. — George Santayana

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character. — George Santayana

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. — George Santayana

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth. — George Santayana

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument, its function is to make the worse appear the better article. A confused competition of all propagandas -- those insults to human nature -- is carried on by the most expert psychological methods -- for instance, by always repeating a lie. — George Santayana

It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation. — George Santayana

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned — George Santayana

Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies. — George Santayana

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness. — 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

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. — George Santayana

Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited. — George Santayana

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads. — George Santayana

Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors. — George Santayana

Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any. — George Santayana

Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand. — George Santayana

The family is one of nature's masterpieces. — George Santayana

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide. — George Santayana

If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved. — George Santayana

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim. — George Santayana

It is a great bond to dislike the same things. — George Santayana

Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good. — George Santayana

Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body. — George Santayana

In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that. — George Santayana

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

Wisdom comes by disillusionment. — George Santayana

The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine. — George Santayana

Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention. — George Santayana

Only the dead have seen the end of the war. — George Santayana

The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices. — George Santayana

The earth has music for those who listen. — George Santayana

Sanity is madness put to good use. — George Santayana

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

Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve. — George Santayana

Habit is stronger than reason. — George Santayana

Oaths are the fossils of piety. — George Santayana

Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up. — George Santayana

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human. — George Santayana

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

The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger. — George Santayana

Man is as full of potential as he is of importance. — George Santayana

Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway — George Santayana

Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul. — George Santayana

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence. — George Santayana

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end. — George Santayana

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool. — George Santayana

Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge. — George Santayana

Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it. — George Santayana

Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on. — George Santayana

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panza's who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixote's with a sense for ideals, but mad. — George Santayana

The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness, and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought. — George Santayana

There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with. — George Santayana

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

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself. — George Santayana

It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on first, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the parts known give us evidence enough that the unknown parts cannot be much amiss. — George Santayana

Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility. — George Santayana

It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness. — George Santayana

The Bible is literature, not dogma. — George Santayana

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal. — George Santayana

The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him. — George Santayana

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands. — George Santayana

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace. — George Santayana

Life Lessons by George Santayana

1. George Santayana believed that the only way to truly understand life is to live it, and that life should be embraced with enthusiasm and joy.
2. He also believed that the only way to truly understand the world is to observe it, and that the only way to truly understand oneself is to reflect on one's experiences.
3. Finally, he believed that it is important to remember the past in order to make wise decisions in the present and plan for the future.