Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known in English as George Santayana was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. Originally from Spain, Santayana was raised and educated in the US from the age of eight and identified himself as an American, although he always retained a valid Spanish passport. At the age of 48, Santayana left his position at Harvard and returned to Europe permanently. These George Santayana quotes will motivate you.
Best George Santayana Quotes
- “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” ~ George Santayana
- “To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.” ~ George Santayana
- “A country without a memory is a country of madmen.” ~ George Santayana
- “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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“The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again” ~ George Santayana
- “Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.” ~ George Santayana
- “For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.” ~ George Santayana
- “Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.” ~ George Santayana
- “The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.” ~ George Santayana
- “When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.” ~ George Santayana
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“Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age” ~ George Santayana
- “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.” ~ George Santayana
- “Happiness is impossible, and even inconceivable, to a mind without scope and without pause, a mind driven by craving, pleasure, or fear. To be happy, you must be reasonable, or you must be tamed. You must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world and what things in it can really serve you. To be happy, you must be wise.” ~ George Santayana
- “The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.” ~ George Santayana
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“Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.” ~ George Santayana
- “We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.” ~ George Santayana
- “To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.” ~ George Santayana
- “What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.” ~ George Santayana
- “To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.” ~ George Santayana
- “Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.” ~ George Santayana
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“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.” ~ George Santayana
- “Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.” ~ George Santayana
- “A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.” ~ George Santayana
- “Love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.” ~ George Santayana
- “Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.” ~ 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
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“Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.” ~ George Santayana
- “A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.” ~ George Santayana
- “There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.” ~ George Santayana
- “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
- “Work and love these are the basics; waking life is a dream controlled.” ~ George Santayana
- “The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.” ~ George Santayana
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“Wisdom comes by disillusionment.” ~ George Santayana
- “Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.” ~ George Santayana
- “Does the thoughtful man suppose that…the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?” ~ George Santayana
- “People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.” ~ George Santayana
- “Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.” ~ George Santayana
- “Beauty is objectified pleasure.” ~ George Santayana
- “Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.” ~ George Santayana
- “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
- “The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.” ~ George Santayana
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“Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.” ~ George Santayana
- “Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.” ~ George Santayana
- “Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.” ~ George Santayana
- “Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.” ~ George Santayana
- “The highest form of vanity is love of fame.” ~ George Santayana
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“The Bible is literature, not dogma.” ~ 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
- “Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one’s powers.” ~ George Santayana
- “Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.” ~ George Santayana
- “Oaths are the fossils of piety.” ~ George Santayana
- “Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer; there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.” ~ George Santayana Quotes
- “Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer; there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.” ~ George Santayana
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“Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.” ~ George Santayana
- “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.” ~ George Santayana
- “Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.” ~ George Santayana
- “There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.” ~ George Santayana
- “Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.” ~ George Santayana
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“Habit is stronger than reason.” ~ George Santayana
- “To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.” ~ George Santayana
- “Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect…” ~ George Santayana
- “The wisest mind has something yet to learn.” ~ George Santayana
- “Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.” ~ George Santayana
