Quotes By George Santayana

The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.

A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.

Habit is stronger than reason.

The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.

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.

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.

Depression is rage spread thin.

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.

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.

The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.