Quotes By George Santayana

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

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

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.

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

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

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

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

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.

Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

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.

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

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

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

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.