George Santayana > Quotes

“Those that fail to 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

“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

“A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”
― 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

“To be interested in the changing seasons is . . . a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.”
― George Santayana

“Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.”
― 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

“Sanity is a madness put to good use”
― George Santayana

“Memory... is an internal rumor.”
― George Santayana

“Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”
― George Santayana

“Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.”
― George Santayana

“Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.”
― George Santayana

“The wisest mind has something yet to learn.”
― George Santayana

“love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.”
― George Santayana

“Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.”
― George Santayana

“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.”
― George Santayana

“Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”
― George Santayana

“He who doesn't understand history is doomed to repeat it.”
― George Santayana

“Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.”
― George Santayana

“The bible is literature, not dogma.”
― George Santayana

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

“Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.”
― George Santayana

“Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
― George Santayana, Soliloquies in England & Later Soliloquies (

“The muffled syllables that Nature speaks
Fill us with deeper longing for her word;
She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,
She makes a sweeter music than is heard.”
― George Santayana

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

“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

“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.”
― George Santayana

“To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.”
― George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty

“Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to relive it.”
― George Santayana, LIFE OF REASON

“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

“Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.”
― George Santayana

“Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.”
― George Santayana, Reason in Religion

“History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory”
― George Santayana

“To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.”
― George Santayana

“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness. ”
― George Santayana

“We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.”
― 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

“An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.”
― George Santayana

“What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.”
― George Santayana, The Life of Reason; Or, the Phases of Human Progress: Introduction, and Reason in Common Sense

“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

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
― George Santayana

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

“Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.”
― George Santayana

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it.”
― George Santayana

“Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination,
but because they are not aware that they have any.”
― George Santayana