Best 419 quotes of George Santayana on MyQuotes

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.

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 conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.

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.

A country without a memory is a country of madmen.

A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument, its function is to make the worse appear the better article. A confused competition of all propagandas -- those insults to human nature -- is carried on by the most expert psychological methods -- for instance, by always repeating a lie.

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

A friend's only gift is himself.

A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.

A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.

All beauties are to be honored, but only one embraced.

All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and he never once gets left behind, or breaks a leg.

All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.

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.

All spiritual interests are supported by animal life.

All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

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

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

America is a young country with an old mentality.

America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.

American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.

A musical education is necessary for musical judgement. What most people relish is hardly music; it is rather a drowsy reverie relieved by nervous thrills.

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

An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.

An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.

Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.

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.

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.

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.

Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.

Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.

A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.

A simple life is its own reward.

A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.

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.

As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends.

At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself, or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat.

A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.

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 a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.

Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.

Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavour to understand him.

Better not be a hero than work oneself up into heroism by shouting lies.

Beware of long arguments and long beards.

Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.