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.
— George Santayana
The most promising George Santayana quotes that are easy to memorize and remember
Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.
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.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
America is a young country with an old mentality.
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.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
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.
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate;
they are green and vigorous in old age.
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.
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
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.
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately;
the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
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.
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.
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
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.
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.
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
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.
Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
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.
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.
Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited.
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.
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
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.
In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
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.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
Happiness is the only sanction of life;
where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.