George Santayana Quotes

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.

The family is one of nature’s masterpieces.

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

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.

The essence of nowness runs like fire along the fuse of time.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

There is not one soul that does not tremble before the abyss of emptiness.

Nothing can endure unless it be founded on truth and built in justice.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

Every religion, besides its minor virtues, sustains a borderline neurosis called a system of salvation.

Philosophy is nothing but a slow and steady disintegration of prejudices and appearances.

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

George Santayana Quotes part 2

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.

The knowledge of how to conduct oneself seems to me to constitute the true aim of education.

To beatle the curious in intellect, with fervent little sentences such as children’s ditties furrow their hearts, to impel the will with pungent expressions, and to let the outward eye, the inner eye, and the reflective eye perceive under separate species and understand under separate species.

Nurture your minds with great thoughts. To believe in the heroic makes heroes.

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.

The one universal act is fear; the one universal feeling is compression; the one universal recognition is dissolution.

To many, total detachment from affairs seems more ignoble than the serene acceptance of said illusion.

Intelligence is quickness to apprehend as distinct from ability, which is capacity to act wisely on the thing apprehended.

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

A diseased imagination can no more give rise to a clear interest in the truth than a crooked mirror can generate a true reflection.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.

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

Our ideas rule us, and we rule only our ideas.

The essence of nowness runs like fire along the fuse of time.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.

The only cure for grief is action.

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

Sanity is a madness put to good uses.

Material progress is not always a good measure of the progress of a society.

The mask in the conventional sense cannot be a vital means of communion.

Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.

The word ‘happiness’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

A child’s education should begin at least 50 years before they were born.

A work of art is a world in itself, reflecting senses and emotions of the artist’s world.

Justice comes from a balance between what is owed and what is claimed.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a youthful state of mind.

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

Love is like an hourglass, with the heart filling up as the brain empties.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

Knowledge is not a series of self-consistent theories that converges toward an ideal view; it is rather an ever-increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth.

Philosophy is a making of miniatures.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.