George Santayana Quotes

Those were the two prerequisites, in my conception, to perfect friendship: capacity to worship and capacity to laugh. Modern life is not made for friendship: common interests are not strong enough, private interests too absorbing. In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.

Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.

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.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.

Faith in the intellect ... is the only faith yet sanctioned by its fruits

Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.

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.

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.

The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.

Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.

Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.

My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

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

It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.

To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.

The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.

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

Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.

In the passion of love, for instance, a cause unknown to the
sufferer, but which is doubtless the spring-flood of hereditary
instincts accidentally let loose, suddenly checks the young
man's gayety, dispels his random curiosity, arrests perhaps his very breath; and when he looks for a cause to explain his
suspended faculties, he can find it only in the presence or image of another being, of whose character, possibly, he knows nothing and whose beauty may not be remarkable; yet
that image pursues him everywhere, and he is dominated by
an unaccustomed tragic earnestness and a new capacity for
suffering and joy.
If the passion be strong there is no previous interest or duty that
will be remembered before it; if it be lasting the whole life may
be reorganized by it, it may impose new habits, other manners,
and another religion.
Yet what is the root of all this idealism? An irrational instinct,
normally intermittent, such as all dumb creatures share, which
has here managed to dominate a human soul and to enlist all the
mental powers in its more or less permanent service, upsetting
their usual equilibrium.
This madness, however, inspires method; and for the first time,
perhaps, in his life, the man has something to live for.

There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.

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

Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.

Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.

The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.

What is the part of wisdom? To dream with one eye open; to be detatched from the world without being hostile to it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings, without forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are.

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.

The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine ... If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is the spirit.

The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.

Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival; they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, Please strike here!

All beauties are to be honored, but only one embraced.

Even if Lucretius was wrong, and the soul is immortal, it is nevertheless steadily changing its interests and its possessions.Our lives are mortal if our soul is not; and the sentiment which reconciled Lucretius to death is as much needed if we are to face many deaths, as if we are to face only one.

Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act wisely.

There is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made us ashamed of ourselves when it was happening: there is a pleasant panoramic sense of what it all was and how it all had to be. Why, if we are not vain or snobbish, need we desire that it should have been different? The better things we missed may yet be enjoyed or attained by someone else somewhere: why isn't that just as good? And there is no regret, either, in the sense of wishing the past to return, or missing it: it is quite real enough as it is, there at its own date and place

The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.

Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.

Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.

Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.

The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.

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

The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend, because he has not imagination enough to sympathize with their proper needs nor humility enough to respect them as if they were his own. Arrogance, fanaticism, meddlesomeness, and imperialism may then masquerade as philanthropy.

Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life.

Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.

Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.

The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.

Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.

The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms.

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

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.

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.

He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

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.

Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.

When we feel the poetic thrill, is it not that we find sweep in the concise and depth in the clear, as we might find all the lights of the sea in the water of a jewel? And what is a philosophic thought but such an epitome?

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

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.

If clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary matters.

You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete sceptic or idealist, but a realist at heart. So long as he is alive his sincere philosophy must fulfil the assumptions of his life and not destroy him.

Beware of long arguments and long beards.

Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.

A musical education is necessary for musical judgement. What most people relish is hardly music; it is rather a drowsy reverie relieved by nervous thrills.

There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.

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.

Docility is the observable half of reason.

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

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.

Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.

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

It is a great bond to dislike the same things.

Sanity is madness put to good use.

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

When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

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.

Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.

It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.

The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.

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.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.

Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.

Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.

Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.

The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.

Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.

The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence

Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.

Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.

To drink in the spirit of a place you should be not only alone but unhurried.

Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.

Criticism surprises the soul in the arms of convention.

The worship of power is an old religion.