Best 419 quotes of George Santayana on MyQuotes

Oaths are the fossils of piety.

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

One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.

One real world is enough.

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.

Order, for a liberal, means only peace; and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.

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.

Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.

Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine That lights the pathway but one step ahead Across a void of mystery and dread.

Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.

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.

Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.

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

People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.

People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.

People who feel themselves to be exiles in this world are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.

Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.

Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.

Philosophers are as jealous as women; each wants a monopoly of praise.

Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.

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.

Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.

Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home.

Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's length.

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

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

Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.

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.

Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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.

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.

Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.

Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked.

Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.

Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.

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

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.

Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.

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.

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.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect...

Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.

Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.

Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.