Quotes

“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.” George Santayana

“Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.” George Santayana

“Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.” George Santayana

“The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.” George Santayana

“The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.” George Santayana

“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.” George Santayana

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

“Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.” George Santayana

“Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.” George Santayana

“I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.” George Santayana

“Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.” George Santayana

“Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.” George Santayana

“Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.” George Santayana

“Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.” George Santayana

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

“Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.” George Santayana

“Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.” George Santayana

“The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.” George Santayana

“The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.” George Santayana

“The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.” George Santayana

“The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.” George Santayana

“The highest form of vanity is love of fame.” George Santayana

“The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.” George Santayana

“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.” George Santayana

“The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.” George Santayana

“Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.” George Santayana

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

“To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.” George Santayana

“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.” George Santayana

“Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.” George Santayana