George Santayana quotes
Introduction
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George Santayana is famous Spanish philosopher with many wise quotes. Share the best George Santayana quotations of all times with your friends and family.
Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
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.
Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited.
Depression is rage spread thin.
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.
The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
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.
Habit is stronger than reason.
Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
America is a young country with an old mentality.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
Sanity is madness put to good use.
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.
George Santayana quotes images
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America is a young country with an old mentality.
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
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Go to table of contentsAbout George Santayana
Where is George Santayana from? George Santayana is Spanish who said awesome wise words. A influential and well recognized philosopher all over the world. The following quotations and images represent the Spanish nature embed in George Santayana's character.
What George Santayana was famous for? George Santayana is famous philosopher with many good quotes. Well-known and respected in Spanish society for wise sayings. Browse a lot of George Santayana books and reference books with quotes from George Santayana on Amazon.
Top George Santayana quotes about life
What are the best life quotes by George Santayana? List with Top 10 George Santayana sayings and quotes about life.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.
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.
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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Top George Santayana quotes about happiness
What are the best happiness quotes by George Santayana? List with Top 10 George Santayana sayings and quotes about happiness.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experience.
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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Top George Santayana quotes about friends
What are the best friends quotes by George Santayana? List with Top 10 George Santayana sayings and quotes about friends.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.
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Top George Santayana quotes about soul
What are the best soul quotes by George Santayana? List with Top 10 George Santayana sayings and quotes about soul.
The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
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.
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Top George Santayana quotes about doubt
What are the best doubt quotes by George Santayana? List with Top 10 George Santayana sayings and quotes about doubt.
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.
The empiricist... thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
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More quotes by George Santayana
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Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.
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.
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
The empiricist... thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
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.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
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.
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experience.
Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or an idea, but is really some stronger material force.
A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
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.
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality. The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.
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.
To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.
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. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians.
Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.
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.
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection must rest on circumstantial evidence.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.
There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
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.
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.
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.
Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
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.
The Bible is literature, not dogma.
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
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.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
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.
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.
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
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.
There is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made us ashamed of ourselves when it was happening: there is a pleasant panoramic sense of what it all was and how it all had to be. Why, if we are not vain or snobbish, need we desire that it should have been different? The better things we missed may yet be enjoyed or attained by someone else somewhere: why isn't that just as good? And there is no regret, either, in the sense of wishing the past to return, or missing it: it is quite real enough as it is, there at its own date and place
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.
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.
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.
All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience.
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
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.
Music is essentially useless, as life is.
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.
The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.
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When was George Santayana birthday? George Santayana was born on December 16, 1863.
Who is George Santayana? Some facts about George Santayana from biography. Philosopher, poet, literary and cultural critic, George Santayana is a principal figure in Classical American Philosophy. His naturalism and emphasis on creative imagination were harbingers of important intellectual turns on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a naturalist before naturalism grew popu... Read more about George Santayana on Wikipedia or watch videos with quotes from George Santayana on YouTube.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part 1
Introduction
Part 2
Best George Santayana quotes
Top 10 quotes by George Santayana
Part 3
George Santayana quotes images
Part 4
Life
Happiness
Friends
Soul
Doubt
All quotes
Part 5
Similar Philosophers
Part 6
Favorite topics
Part 7
Conclusion