George Santayana Quotes

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility.

Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

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

Before he sets out the traveller must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel. If he drifted aimlessly from country to country he would not travel but only wander ramble as a tramp. The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere so his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

Consciousness is a born hermit.

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

It is wisdom to believe the heart.

Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die which is man's charter of nobility.

Before you contradict an old man my fair friend you should endeavour to understand him.

There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.

The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,She makes a sweeter music than is heard.

There is nothing to which men while they have food and drink cannot reconcile themselves.

The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.

The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its total temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition; and candor and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost.

Art is a delayed echo.

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.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

England is the paradise of individuality eccentricity heresy anomalies hobbies and humours.

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

With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

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

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

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.

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

The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

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

Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo The Last Puritan and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.

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

To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.

Prayer among sane people has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions, their reasons are always different.

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another people are friends in spots.

It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on without enquiry and almost at first sight the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends the part known gives us evidence enough that the unknown part cannot be much amiss.

The earth has its music for those who will listen.

The man who is not permitted to own is owned.

If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

There is nothing sacred about convention there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.

To cement a new friendship especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person and cut across the accidents of place and time.

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

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

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.

Habit is stronger than reason.

In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.

Sanity is a madness put to good uses.

An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.

Work and love - these are the basics waking life is a dream controlled.

Depression is rage spread thin.