George Santayana Quotes

343 Sourced Quotes

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

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

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

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

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

George Santayana
With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

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

George Santayana
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
Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.

George Santayana
Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.

George Santayana
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

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

George Santayana
Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.

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

George Santayana
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

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

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

George Santayana
Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.

George Santayana
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
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
There are many events in the womb of time which will be delivered.

George Santayana
In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.

George Santayana
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
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
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