George Santayana
182 quotes
Biography
"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."
"Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots."
"To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world."
"Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said."
"love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers."
"On fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact."
"Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good."
"[Everything] ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development."
"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."
"Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment."
"That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions."
"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."
"The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice."
"To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love."
"It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation."
"Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate."
"What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art."
"When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different."
"In proportion as a man's interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates and expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach the same impersonal level of ideas."
"Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them."
"Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them."
"Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor."
"To know how just a cause we have for grieving is already a consolation."
"The mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a truth, however unwelcome to the flesh, or discover an actual force, however unfavourable to given interests."
"Art like life should be free, since both are experimental."