George Santayana Quotations

1.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.

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

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

4.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.

5.Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

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

7.Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

8.America is a young country with an old mentality.

9.Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.

10.Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.

11.Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.

12.Sanity is a madness put to good use.

13.Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

14.Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

15.The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.

16.The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

17.Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.

18.To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

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

20.Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they and we go very well together.

21.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.

22.The young man who has not wept is a savage,
and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.

23.Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

24.Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

25.An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

26.Music is essentially useless, as life is.

27.Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

28.Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

29.The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

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

31.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.

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

33.For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.

34.Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.

35.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.

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

37.It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.

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

39.Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.

40.The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

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