George Santayana

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

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

A child only educated at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana - The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905
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.

Society is like the air; necessary to breathe, but insufficient to live on.
George Santayana - Little Essays (1920) "Ideal Immortality"
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
George Santayana - Soliloquies in England, 1922, "War Shrines"
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

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

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.

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

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 - Life of Reason (1905) vol. 1, ch. 10
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
George Santayana - "The German Mind: A Philosophical Diagnosis"
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.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
George Santayana - Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 4
Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

Sanity is a madness put to good use.
George Santayana - Dialogues in Limbo (1925) ch. 3
The young man who has not wept is a savage,
and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
George Santayana - The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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

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

America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.

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

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

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

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 enabline it to make its peace with its destiny.
George Santayana - Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 8
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
George Santayana - Winds of Doctrine (1913) ch. 2
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.

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.

Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, not condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.
George Santayana - The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
George Santayana - Life of Reason (1905) vol. 1, Introduction
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

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

Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. On the contrary, in friendship union is more about ideal things: and in that sense it is more ideal and less subject to trouble than marriage is.

The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
George Santayana - Winds of Doctrine (1913) ch. 4
Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.

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.

The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
George Santayana - Vol. 53 / No. 18 MMWR page 391
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

Sanity is a madness put to good use.

America is a young country with an old mentality.

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
George Santayana - Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 4
Music is essentially useless, as life is.

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

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
George Santayana - Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 3
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

- George Santayana