George Santayana quotes

“It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.”

— George Santayana

“Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.”

— George Santayana

“Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.”

— George Santayana

“Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.”

— George Santayana

“Music is essentially useless, as is life.”

— George Santayana

“Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.”

— George Santayana

“Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.”

— George Santayana

“Oaths are the fossils of piety.”

— George Santayana

“Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

“That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.”

— George Santayana

“The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.”

— George Santayana

“The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.”

— George Santayana

“The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.”

— George Santayana

“The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.”

— George Santayana

“The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.”

— George Santayana

“The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

“Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.”

— George Santayana

“Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.”

— George Santayana

“It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.”

— George Santayana

“It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.”

— George Santayana

“My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.”

— George Santayana

“Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.”

— George Santayana

“The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.”

— George Santayana

“Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.”

— George Santayana

“The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.”

— George Santayana