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Body, the
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The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
-George Santayana
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Business
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The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness, and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.
-George Santayana, The Crime of Galileo
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Depression
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Depression is rage spread thin.
-George Santayana, [attributed]
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Ego
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Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
-George Santayana
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Facts
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"I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads."
-George Santayana, The Letters of George Santayana
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History
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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.
-George Santayana, The Life of Reason [1905-1906], Volume I, Reason in Common Sense, Chapter 12, 1906
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Ideas
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Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or an idea, but is really some stronger material force.
-George Santayana, Persons and Places: The Middle Span, 1945
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Love
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Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection must rest on circumstantial evidence.
-George Santayana
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Motivational
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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.
-George Santayana
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Opinion
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Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.
-George Santayana
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Passion
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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
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Past, the
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There is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made us ashamed of ourselves when it was happening: there is a pleasant panoramic sense of what it all was and how it all had to be. Why, if we are not vain or snobbish, need we desire that it should have been different? The better things we missed may yet be enjoyed or attained by someone else somewhere: why isn't that just as good? And there is no regret, either, in the sense of wishing the past to return, or missing it: it is quite real enough as it is, there at its own date and place…
-George Santayana, letter to Mary Winslow, 1920
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Philosophy
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Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.
-George Santayana, Egotism in German Philosophy
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Soul
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"Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body."
-George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Art, 1906
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"The Soul is the voice of the body's interests."
-George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense, 1906
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Virtue
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"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, The Letters of George Santayana
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War
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It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.
-George Santayana, Persons and Places, 1944
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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
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Books by and about George Santayana
