George Santayana quotes

“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

“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.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

“All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.”

— George Santayana

“Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.”

— George Santayana

“By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.”

— George Santayana

“Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

“If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.”

— George Santayana

“It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.”

— George Santayana