George Santayana quotes

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

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

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

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

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

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.

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.

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

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

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

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.

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

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

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

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

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.

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.

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

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

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