George Santayana - The Life of Reason

106 Sourced Quotes

View all George Santayana Quotes
If pain could have cured us, we should long ago have been saved.

George Santayana
Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.

George Santayana
Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.

George Santayana
Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.

George Santayana
The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.

George Santayana
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.

George Santayana
We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.

George Santayana
Love is at once more animal than friendship and more divine...

George Santayana
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

George Santayana
Emotion is primarily about nothing, and much of it remains nothing to the end.

George Santayana
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

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
There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he.

George Santayana
Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.

George Santayana
Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor.

George Santayana
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

George Santayana
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

George Santayana
Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

George Santayana
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.

George Santayana
You and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams.

George Santayana
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

George Santayana
Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions... Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.

George Santayana
Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.

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

George Santayana
A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.

George Santayana
Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.

George Santayana
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

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

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

George Santayana