George Santayana Quotes

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Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

George Santayana
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

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

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

George Santayana
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
Character is the basis of happiness, and happiness the sanction of character.

George Santayana
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

George Santayana
The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.

George Santayana
What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.

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

George Santayana
Though the heart wear the garment of its sorrow And be not happy like a naked star, Yet from the thought of peace some peace we borrow, Some rapture from the rapture felt afar.

George Santayana
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.

George Santayana
Theory - when we use the word for a schema of things' relations and not for contemplation of them in their detail and fulness - is an expedient to cover ignorance and remedy confusion.

George Santayana
Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.

George Santayana
Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature's meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal.

George Santayana
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

George Santayana
The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.

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

George Santayana
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.

George Santayana
What seekest thou else In the dark backward and abysm of time?

George Santayana
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
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

George Santayana
When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.

George Santayana
Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.

George Santayana