Misattributed George Santayana Quotes

The earth has its music for those who will listen ~ Reginald Vincent Holmes

I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, untravelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion. ~ George Santayana

Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity. ~ George Santayana

It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger. ~ George Santayana

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. ~ George Santayana

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

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide. ~ George Santayana

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

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them. ~ George Santayana

Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center. ~ George Santayana

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

People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them. ~ George Santayana

A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world. ~ 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

I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free, from world to world, from all worlds carried me. ~ George Santayana

The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder. ~ George Santayana

If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk. ~ George Santayana

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

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

To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language. ~ George Santayana

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. ~ George Santayana

Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view; as to knowing her through and through; that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains. ~ George Santayana

In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses. Now, when one demands liberty of speech and of the press, one is not demanding absolute liberty. There always must be, or at any rate there always will be, some degree of censorship, so long as organised societies endure. But freedom, as Rosa Luxembourg [sic] said, is 'freedom for the other fellow'. The same principle is contained in the famous words of Voltaire: 'I detest what you say; I will defend to the death your right to say it.' If the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation means anything at all, it means that everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way. ~ George Orwell

The wisest man has something yet to learn. ~ George Santayana

Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of them that has grown into a jealous passion. ~ George Santayana

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

The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought. ~ George Santayana

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

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. ~ George Santayana

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present. ~ George Santayana

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

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others. ~ George Santayana

Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors. ~ George Santayana

Only the dead have seen the end of the war. ~ George Santayana

Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually towards another, makes it one of the dearest employments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solicitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty? ~ George Santayana

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. ~ George Santayana

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

The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him. ~ George Santayana

The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about. Athletics don't make anybody long-lived or useful. ~ George Santayana

I have no axe to grind; only my thoughts to burnish. ~ George Santayana

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

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

The truth properly means the sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities andrelations which the world has exemplified or will exemplify. The truth is all things seen under the form of eternity. ~ George Santayana

Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good. ~ George Santayana

Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world. ~ George Santayana

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. ~ George Santayana

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. ~ George Santayana

Until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play. ~ George Santayana

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. ~ George Santayana