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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience.
-George Santayana
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Every actual animal is somewhat dull and somewhat mad. He will at times miss his signals and stare vacantly when he might well act, while at other times he will run off into convulsions and raise a dust in his own brain to no purpose. These imperfections are so human that we should hardly recognise ourselves if we could shake them off altogether. Not to retain any dulness would mean to possess untiring attention and universal interests, thus realising the boast about deeming nothing human alien to us; while to be absolutely without folly would involve perfect self-knowledge and self-control. The intelligent man known to history flourishes within a dullard and holds a lunatic in leash. He is encased in a protective shell of ignorance and insensibility which keeps him from being exhausted and confused by this too complicated world; but that integument blinds him at the same time to many of his nearest and highest interests. He is amused by the antics of the brute dreaming within his breast; he gloats on his passionate reveries, an amusement which sometimes costs him very dear. Thus the best human intelligence is still decidely barbarous; it fights in heavy armour and keeps a fool at court.
-George Santayana
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Advertising
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Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
-George Santayana
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Advice
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The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
-George Santayana
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America
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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
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America is a young country with an old mentality.
-George Santayana
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Anger
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To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.
-George Santayana
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Art
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The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
-George Santayana
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Assumptions
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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.
-George Santayana
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Beauty
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Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
-George Santayana
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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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Chaos
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Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
-George Santayana
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Character
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Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
-George Santayana
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City Life, Cities
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Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.
-George Santayana
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Commitment
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The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
-George Santayana
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Concentration
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The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.
-George Santayana
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Conscience
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Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
-George Santayana
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Conversation
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The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
-George Santayana
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Death
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There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.
-George Santayana
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Depression
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Depression is rage spread thin.
-George Santayana, attributed
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Determination
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The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
-George Santayana
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Dignity
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Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
-George Santayana
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Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.
-George Santayana
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Doubt
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Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.
-George Santayana
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There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
-George Santayana
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The empiricist... thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
-George Santayana
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Education
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Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
-George Santayana
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The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
-George Santayana
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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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Emotions
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The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
-George Santayana
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Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
-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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Fame
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The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
-George Santayana
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Family
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The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.
-George Santayana
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The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
-George Santayana
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Fanaticism
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Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
-George Santayana
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Fashion
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Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
-George Santayana
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Fate & Destiny
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It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
-George Santayana
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Fear
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That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
-George Santayana
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Food
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There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
-George Santayana
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Freedom
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A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
-George Santayana
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Friends
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Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
-George Santayana
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Habits
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Habit is stronger than reason.
-George Santayana
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Happiness
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Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
-George Santayana
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Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experience.
-George Santayana
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History
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History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
-George Santayana
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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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Inferiority
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Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.
-George Santayana
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Knowledge
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Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
-George Santayana
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Liberty
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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
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Life
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Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
-George Santayana
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The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.
-George Santayana
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Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.
-George Santayana
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Love
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The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
-George Santayana
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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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Marriage
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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
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Memory
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In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality. The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.
-George Santayana
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Men & Women
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When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
-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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Music
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Music is essentially useless, as life is.
-George Santayana
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Nonsense
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Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited.
-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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Pain
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If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
-George Santayana
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Parenting
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Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
-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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Patriotism
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A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
-George Santayana
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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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Pleasure
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Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
-George Santayana
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Potential
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Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
-George Santayana
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Prayer
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Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
-George Santayana
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Pride
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The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
-George Santayana
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Profanity, Swearing, Vulgarity
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Oaths are the fossils of piety.
-George Santayana
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Property
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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
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Proverbial Wisdom
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Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
-George Santayana
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Questions
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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
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Reason
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The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.
-George Santayana
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Sacrifice
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Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
-George Santayana
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Sadness
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It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
-George Santayana
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Saint, Saints
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It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
-George Santayana
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Sanity
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Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
-George Santayana
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Science
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Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.
-George Santayana
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Seasons
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To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
-George Santayana
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Society
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The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
-George Santayana
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Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
-George Santayana
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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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Space
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The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.
-George Santayana
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Spirituality
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The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
-George Santayana
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Superstition
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Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.
-George Santayana
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Sympathy
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There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
-George Santayana
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Theater
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The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.
-George Santayana
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Thought
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All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
-George Santayana
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Tragedy
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The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.
-George Santayana
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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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Wisdom
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Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
-George Santayana
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Words
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To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
-George Santayana
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Worth
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Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
-George Santayana
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Books by and about George Santayana
