George Santayana Quotes and Sayings
- Name:
- George Santayana (random)
- Books & Videos:
- George Santayana Books & Videos
- Type:
- Philosopher
- Nationality:
- American
- Birth Date / Year:
- December 16, 1863
- Death Date / Year:
- September 26, 1952
Similar People: George Henry Lewes | Theophrastus | Diogenes of Sinope | Charles de Montesquieu | ...
- 1
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 2
A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 3
A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 4
A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 5
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 6
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 7
All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 8
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 9
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 10
America is a young country with an old mentality. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 11
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 12
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 13
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
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By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 15
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 16
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 17
Depression is rage spread thin. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 18
Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 19
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 20
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 21
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 22
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 23
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 24
For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 25
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 26
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 27
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 28
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 29
Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 30
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 31
Habit is stronger than reason. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 32
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
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History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 34
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 35
I like to walk about among 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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 36
If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 37
In Greece wise men speak and fools decide. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 38
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 39
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 40
It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 41
It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 42
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 43
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 44
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 45
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 46
Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 47
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 48
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 49
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 50
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 51
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 52
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 53
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 54
Music is essentially useless, as is life. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 55
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 56
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 57
Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 58
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 59
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 60
Oaths are the fossils of piety. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 61
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 62
Only the dead have seen the end of the war. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 63
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 64
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 65
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 66
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 67
Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 68
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 69
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 70
Sanity is a madness put to good use. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 71
Sanity is madness put to good use. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 72
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 73
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 74
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 75
The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 76
The Bible is literature, not dogma. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 77
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 78
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 79
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 80
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 81
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 82
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 83
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 84
The family is one of nature's masterpieces. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 85
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 86
The highest form of vanity is love of fame. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 87
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 88
The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 89
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 90
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 91
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 92
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 93
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 94
The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 95
The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 96
The Soul is the voice of the body's interests. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 97
The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 98
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 99
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 100
The wisest mind has something yet to learn. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 101
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 102
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 103
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 104
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 105
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 106
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 107
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 108
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 109
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 110
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 | Refcard PDF ↑
- 111
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 112
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 113
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 114
To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 115
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 116
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 117
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 118
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
- 119
Wisdom comes by disillusionment. George Santayana | Refcard PDF ↑
