Philosopher · American · 1863 – 1952 · 118 quotes
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
George Santayana
Philosopher · American · 1863 – 1952
It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
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.
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
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.
The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
America is a young country with an old mentality.
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.
Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
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.
If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
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.
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.
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
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.
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.
It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
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.
