quotes by George Santayana

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
— George Santayana

"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
— George Santayana

"The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns."
— George Santayana

"Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds."
— George Santayana

"My atheism ... 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 (The Life of Reason (Five Volumes in One))

"Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. "
— George Santayana

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

"Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.


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— George Santayana

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

"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

"The wisest mind has something yet to learn."
— George Santayana

"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."
— George Santayana

"why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together. "
— 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

"Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience."
— George Santayana

"In my adolescence I thought this earthly life a most hideous thing, and I was not disinclined to dismiss it as an illusion, for which perhaps the Catholic epic might be substituted to advantage, as conforming better to the impulses of the soul; and later I liked to regard all systems as alternative illusions for the solipsist; but neither solipsism nor Catholicism were ever anything to me but theoretic poses or possibilities; vistas for the imagination, never convictions."
— George Santayana

"Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself."
— George Santayana

"To be interested in the changing seasons is . . . a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring."
— 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.

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— George Santayana

"My atheism…is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servant of their human interests."
— George Santayana