All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
George Santayana
- More quotations by Philosopher
George Santayana quotes
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
The Bible is literature, not dogma.
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
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.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
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.
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
America is a young country with an old mentality.
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
Depression is rage spread thin.
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.
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.
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
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.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
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.
If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
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.
In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
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.
It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
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.
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
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.
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
O World, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Thse who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
Sanity is madness put to good use.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
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.
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
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.
The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of the content.
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
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.
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
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