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

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

"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)

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

"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."
— George Santayana

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

"Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better."
— George Santayana

"Sanity is a madness put to good use"
— George Santayana

"The bible is literature, not dogma."
— George Santayana

"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

"There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval."
— George Santayana

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

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

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

"Memory... is an internal rumor."
— 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

"A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world."
— George Santayana

"Since the days of Descartes it has been a conception familiar to philosophers that every visible event in nature might be explained by previous visible events, and that all the motions, for instance, of the tongue in speech, or of the hand in painting, might have merely physical causes. If consciousness is thus accessory to life and not essential to it, the race of man might have existed upon the earth and acquired all the arts necessary for its subsistence without possessing a single sensation, idea, or emotion. Natural selection might have secured the survival of those automata which made useful reactions upon their environment. An instinct would have been developed, dangers would have been shunned without being feared, and injuries avenged without being felt."
— George Santayana (Little Essays Drawn from the Writings of George Santayana)

"There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves."
— George Santayana

"Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence."
— George Santayana

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

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

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

"A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim"
— 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

"Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily."
— George Santayana