George Santayana Quotes

343 Sourced Quotes

Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.

George Santayana
It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.

George Santayana
Words are weapons, and it is dangerous…to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.

George Santayana
The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.

George Santayana
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men into their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

George Santayana
Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.

George Santayana
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.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart,
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul's invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.

George Santayana
Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable, precisely, the balance and wisdom that come from long perspectives and broad foundations

George Santayana
I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.

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

George Santayana
Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.

George Santayana
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

George Santayana
The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

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

George Santayana
The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

George Santayana
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.

George Santayana
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

George Santayana
If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

George Santayana
So in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being known how to touch it. That being is not selected but recognized and obeyed.

George Santayana
Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view; as to knowing her through and through; that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.

George Santayana
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.

George Santayana
What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

George Santayana
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.

George Santayana
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.

George Santayana
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.

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

George Santayana
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.

George Santayana
I like to walk about amidst 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.

George Santayana
Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.

George Santayana
The mystic can live happily in the droning consciousness of his own heart-beats and those of the universe.

George Santayana