George Santayana Quotes | GloryQuotes

George Santayana Quotes About Spiritual

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

George Santayana

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

George Santayana

A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.

George Santayana

Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

George Santayana

The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.

George Santayana

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.

George Santayana

George Santayana Quotes About Life

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

George Santayana

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.

George Santayana

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

George Santayana

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

George Santayana

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

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

More Quotes by George Santayana

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

The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.

George Santayana

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

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

George Santayana

Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.

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

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

George Santayana

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.

George Santayana

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

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

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

George Santayana

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.

George Santayana

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.

George Santayana

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.

George Santayana

Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

George Santayana

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

George Santayana

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

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana

Browse 118 quotes attributed to George Santayana, listed in the source data as a American Philosopher, organized around themes such as Spiritual, Life, Friendship. Use the topic links to explore similar quotes, or browse the full author collection in one place.