George Santayana Quotes

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.

America is a young country with an old mentality.

Depression is rage spread thin.

Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited.

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

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

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

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

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

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.

Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.

Habit is stronger than reason.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

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

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.

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

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

Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.

Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.

The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.

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.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.

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

Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.

The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.

America is a young country with an old mentality.

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument;

its function is to make the worse appear the better.

Happiness is the only sanction of life;

where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

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

Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.

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

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

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.

Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

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

For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.

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.

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.

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

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

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

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

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.

Happiness is the only sanction of life;

where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experience.

The empiricist... thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.