George Santayana - Happiness Quotes

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

George Santayana
It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.

George Santayana
A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.

George Santayana
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.

George Santayana
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

George Santayana
Happiness is impossible, and even inconceivable, to a mind without scope and without pause, a mind driven by craving, pleasure, or fear. To be happy, you must be reasonable, or you must be tamed. You must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world and what things in it can really serve you. To be happy, you must be wise.

George Santayana
Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked.

George Santayana
Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind.

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

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

George Santayana
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

George Santayana