Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about George Santayana
George Santayana Quotes
343 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
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.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
Character is the basis of happiness, and happiness the sanction of character.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; … They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
There are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
It is a pleasant surprise to him [the mathematician], and an added problem, if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them; much as if a composer found that the sailors could have better when singing his songs.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Awe very properly hangs about it, since it is the immovable standard and silent witness of all our memories and assertions; and the past and the future, which in our anxious life are so differently interesting and so differently dark, are one seamless garment for the truth, shining like the sun.
George Santayana
Source
Report...
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across a void of mystery and dread.
George Santayana
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
...
12
Quote of the day
Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.
Edward Dahlberg
George Santayana
Creative Commons
Born:
December 16, 1863
Died:
September 26, 1952
(aged 88)
Bio:
Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known as George Santayana, was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist.
Known for:
The Life of Reason
The Sense of Beauty (1896)
The Last Puritan (1935)
Three philosophical poets (1910)
Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923)
Most used words:
life
man
religion
happiness
experience
philosophy
mind
human
live
ideal
soul
nature
natural
love
science
George Santayana on Wikipedia
George Santayana works on Gutenberg Project
George Santayana works on Wikisource
Suggest an edit or a new quote
George Santayana Quotes
George Santayana Short Quotes
Spanish Philosopher Quotes
Philosopher Quotes
19th-century Philosopher Quotes
Related Authors
William James
American Psychologist
Friedrich Nietzsche
German Philosopher
Ralph Waldo Emerson
American Essayist
Bertrand Russell
British Philosopher
John Stuart Mill
British Philosopher
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes