Quotes By George Santayana

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

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

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

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

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

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

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

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

Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.

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

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.

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.

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.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

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.

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.

By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.