George Santayana quotes:

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To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
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.
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
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.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
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 enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.
Music is essentially useless, as is life.
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
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.
The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
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.
The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.
Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
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.
We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.
America is a young country with an old mentality.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
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.
The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices.
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.
The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.
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.
Photography at first was asked to do nothing but embalm our best smiles for the benefit of our friends and our best clothes for the amusement of posterity. Neither thing lasts, and photography came as a welcome salve to keep those precious, if slightly ridiculous, things a little longer in the world.
A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger.
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 rests on circumstantial evidence.
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart save one that Faith deciphered in the skies.
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.
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
Depression is rage spread thin.
Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view; as to knowing her through and through; that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.
The Bible is literature, not dogma.
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
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.
In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
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.
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.
Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival; they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, "Please strike here!
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
It is a great bond to dislike the same things.
In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
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.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
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.
There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar and anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce stupidity. Such a headless people has the mind of a worm and the claws of a dragon.
Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.
What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?
Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.
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.
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
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.
People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
Work and love these are the basics; waking life is a dream controlled.
In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
We are not compelled in naturalism, or even in materialism, to ignore immaterial things; the point is that any immaterial things which are recognized shall be regarded as names, aspects, functions, or concomitant products of those physical things among which action goes on.
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.
Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.

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