Quotes By George Santayana

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.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

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.

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

There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Oaths are the fossils of piety.

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

To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

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

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.

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

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.

It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.

The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.