Quotes By George Santayana

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

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

Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.

The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.

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

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

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

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.

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

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

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

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

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.

The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.

Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

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

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

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

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