Welcome to our collection of George Santayana Quotes. George Santayana was a Spanish-born American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist who is best known for his philosophical aphorisms and moral reflections. His work has had a great influence on modern thought, and his quotes are often quoted in books, articles, and speeches. Here, you will find a selection of his most famous quotes, which are sure to inspire, provoke, and challenge you.
George Santayana Quotes About Art
🟣”A man’s memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.”
“An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.”
🟣”Art is a delayed echo.”
🟣”Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.”
🟣”Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.”
🟣”Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience – the union of life and peace.”
🟣”Does the thoughtful man suppose that…the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?”
🟣”Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.”
🟣”I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, un-travelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion.”
🟣”If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.”
🟣”Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of them that has grown into a jealous passion.”
🟣”It is a pleasant surprise to him (the pure mathematician) and an added problem if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them, much as if a composer found that sailors could heave better when singing his songs.
🟣”It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
🟣”Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.”
🟣”O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart. Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies; To trust the soul’s invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art.”
🟣”The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.”
🟣”The earth has music for those who listen.”
🟣”The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.”
🟣”The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.”
🟣”The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.”
🟣”The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.”
🟣”The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself…It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices.”
🟣”The sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a vehicle for things.”
🟣”What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art .”
George Santayana Quotes About Atheism
🟣”Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular…. Every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and the bias which that revelation gives to life.”
🟣”Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom – picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode – may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair.”
🟣”Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon’s that ‘a little philosophy inclineth a man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.’ At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram… he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men’s minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.”
“Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.”
🟣”Fear first created the gods.”
🟣”For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.”
🟣”History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.”
🟣”It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity… To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously – these have been thought points of honor with the gods.”
🟣”Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.”
🟣”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.”
🟣”Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.”
🟣”Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.”
🟣”That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.”
🟣”There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.”
George Santayana Quotes About Life
🟣”All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.”
🟣”Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience – the union of life and peace.”
🟣”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.”
🟣”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.”
🟣”It is the acme of life to understand life.”
🟣”Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.”
🟣”Man is not made to understand life, but to live it.”
🟣”Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.”
“One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”
🟣”The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor.”
🟣”Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.”
🟣”The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.”
🟣”The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.”
🟣”There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”
🟣”To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.”
George Santayana Quotes About Memories
🟣”A country without a memory is a country of madmen.”
🟣”A man’s memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.”
🟣”History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.”
🟣”In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality….The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.”
🟣”It would be hard to conceive a system of instincts more nicely adjusted, where the constituents should represent or support one another better. The husband has an interest in protecting the wife, she in serving the husband. The weaker gains in authority and safety, the wilder and more unconcerned finds a help-mate at home to take thought of his daily necessities. Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.”
🟣”Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.”
🟣”Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird’s chirp.”
🟣”Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.”
🟣”Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
🟣”The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.”
🟣”The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.”
“To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.”
🟣”Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Awe very properly hangs about it, since it is the immovable standard and silent witness of all our memories and assertions; and the past and the future, which in our anxious life are so differently interesting and so differently dark, are one seamless garment for the truth, shining like the sun.”
🟣”With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array.”
🟣”Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,– What I keep of you, or you rob from me.”
George Santayana Quotes About Philosophy
🟣”Does the thoughtful man suppose that…the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?”
🟣”Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon’s that ‘a little philosophy inclineth a man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.’ At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram… he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men’s minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.”
🟣”It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.”
🟣”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.”
🟣”Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.”
🟣”Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.”
🟣”Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.”
🟣”Philosophers are as jealous as women; each wants a monopoly of praise.”
🟣”Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities.”
🟣”Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.”
🟣”Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.”
🟣”Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.”
🟣”Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.”
“The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor.”
🟣”Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.”
🟣”The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men’s minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them. The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
🟣”The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.”
🟣”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.”
🟣”There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor’s chair.”
🟣”You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a complete sceptic or idealist, but a realist at heart.”
🟣”So long as he is alive his sincere philosophy must fulfil the assumptions of his life and not destroy him.”
George Santayana Quotes About Religion
🟣”Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”
🟣”An operation that eventually kills may be technically successful, and the man may die cured; and so a description of religion thatshowed it to be madness might first show how real and warm it was, so that if it perished, at least it would perish understood.”
🟣”Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedism, extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like Buddhism, it had looked only for peace and the liberation of souls. It looked beyond; it dreamt of infinite blisses and crowns it should be crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God. Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with anesthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire.”
🟣”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.”
🟣”Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.”
🟣”Fear first created the gods.”
🟣”It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.”
🟣”Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.”
“Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.”
🟣”Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.”
🟣”Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.”
🟣”Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.”
🟣”Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one’s fine feelings, on one’s indomitable optimism and trust in life.”
🟣”Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.”
🟣”The Bible is literature, not dogma.”
🟣”Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.”
🟣”A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world; and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.”
🟣”A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.”
🟣”All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.”
🟣”Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.”
🟣”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.”
🟣”Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.”
🟣”Man alone knows that he must die; but that very knowledge raises him, in a sense, above mortality, by making him a sharer in the vision of eternal truth. He becomes the spectator of his own tragedy; he sympathizes so much with the fury of the storm that he has no ears left for the shipwrecked sailor, though the sailor were his own soul. The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.”
🟣”My soul hates the fool whose only passion is to live by rule.”
🟣”Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.”
🟣”O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart.”
🟣”Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies; To trust the soul’s invincible surmise Was all his science and his only art.”
🟣”Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretension to be dealing with matters of fact. That pretension is not only the source of the conflicts of religion with science and the vain and bitter controversies of sects; it is also the cause of the impurity and incoherence of religion in the soul.”
🟣”Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually towards another, makes it one of the dearest employments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solicitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty?”
🟣”Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely a vehicle for joy.”
🟣”The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is queen, infinite fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.”
🟣”The Soul is the voice of the body’s interests.”
🟣”The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.”
🟣”To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.”
George Santayana Quotes About Accidents
🟣”Each religion necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself. Religions, like languages, are necessary rivals. What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.”
🟣”Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They all may collapse altogether.”
🟣”Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.”
🟣”Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.”
🟣”What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.”
George Santayana Quotes About Age
🟣”Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.”
🟣”Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavour to understand him.”
🟣”Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.”
🟣”Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation is highly specialized and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant. The invectives of one school against another, perverse as they are philosophically, are artistically often signs of health, because they indicate a vital appreciation of certain kinds of beauty, a love of them that has grown into a jealous passion.”
🟣”Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo, The Last Puritan, and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age, I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure, more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.”
🟣”Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.”
🟣”Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird’s chirp.”
🟣”Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable, precisely, the balance and wisdom that come from long perspectives and broad foundations.
🟣”The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.”
🟣”The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.”
🟣”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.”
🟣”What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?”
George Santayana Quotes About Ambition
🟣”Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions… Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.”
🟣”The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor.”
🟣”Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.”
George Santayana Quotes About Animals
🟣”All spiritual interests are supported by animal life.”
🟣”Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.”
🟣”In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality….The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.”
🟣”Love is at once more animal than friendship and more divine.”
🟣”Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.”
🟣”Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.”
🟣”Spirit itself is not human; it may spring up in any life… it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?”
🟣”The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.”
George Santayana Quotes About Anxiety
🟣”Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo, The Last Puritan, and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age, I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure, more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.”
🟣”Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.”
George Santayana Quotes About Balance
🟣”Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”
🟣”Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”
🟣”Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable, precisely, the balance and wisdom that come from long perspectives and broad foundations.”
George Santayana Quotes About Beauty
🟣”All beauties are to be honored, but only one embraced.”
🟣”Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.”
🟣”Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.”
🟣”Beauty is objectified pleasure.”
🟣”In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.”
🟣”Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.”
🟣”It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.”
🟣”The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.”
🟣”The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.”
🟣”To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful.”
George Santayana Quotes About Belief
🟣”By “essence” I understand a universal, of any degree of complexity and definition, which may be given immediately, whether to sense or to thought…. This object of pure sense or pure thought, with no belief superadded, an object inwardly complete and individual, but without external relations or physical status, is what I call an essence.”
🟣”The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.”
🟣”When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.”
George Santayana Quotes About Change
🟣”A man’s memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.”
🟣”In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.”
🟣”Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.”
George Santayana Quotes About Character
🟣”A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.”
🟣”Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.”
🟣”Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.”
🟣”Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them.”
🟣”My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.”
🟣”Our character … is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.”
🟣”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.”
🟣”The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.”
George Santayana Quotes About Chastity
🟣”Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer; there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.”
🟣”Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.”
George Santayana Quotes About Children
🟣”A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”
🟣”Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.”
🟣”It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.”
🟣”It would be hard to conceive a system of instincts more nicely adjusted, where the constituents should represent or support one another better. The husband has an interest in protecting the wife, she in serving the husband. The weaker gains in authority and safety, the wilder and more unconcerned finds a help-mate at home to take thought of his daily necessities. Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.”
🟣”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.”
🟣”Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.”
🟣”Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.”
🟣”With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child’s eyes.”
George Santayana Quotes About Christianity
🟣”Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions… Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing.”
🟣”For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.”
🟣”Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.”
🟣”The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.”
George Santayana Quotes About Common Sense
🟣”Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.”
🟣”Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.”
🟣”Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common-sense rounded out and minutely articulated. It is therefore as much an instinctive product, as much a stepping forth of human courage in the dark, as is any inevitable dream or impulsive action.”
George Santayana Quotes About Conformity
🟣”Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.”
🟣”Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.”
🟣”The scientific value of truth is not, however, ultimate or absolute. It rests partly on practical, partly on aesthetic interests. As our ideas are gradually brought into conformity with the facts by the painful process of selection,-for intuition runs equally into truth and into error, and can settle nothing if not controlled by experience,-we gain vastly in our command over our environment. This is the fundamental value of natural science.”
George Santayana Quotes About Conscience
🟣”Most men’s conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.”
🟣”Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.”
🟣”Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.”
🟣”The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.”
George Santayana Quotes About Contemplation
🟣”Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience – the union of life and peace.”
🟣”In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.”
🟣”Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely a vehicle for joy.”
🟣”To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.”
George Santayana Quotes About Criticism
🟣”Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.”
🟣”To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.”
🟣”Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.”
🟣”With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child’s eyes.”
Verdict
George Santayana Quotes are timeless lessons that are applicable to many aspects of life. His words can provide guidance and inspiration to people of all ages and backgrounds. His words also serve as reminders that we should be mindful of our own actions and the consequences of our decisions. His quotes are often thought-provoking and encourage us to be reflective and open-minded.