Santayana Quotes

The earth has its music for those who will listen

Sanity is a madness put to good uses.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." (George Santayana) I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

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.

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

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.

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.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

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

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

Memory... is an internal rumor.

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

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.

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

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.

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

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.

To know your future you must know your past

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

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

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

The bible is literature, not dogma.

The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard.

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

The worship of power is an old religion.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there. . . . History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten

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.

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

The earth has its music for those who will listen.

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.

Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.

The earth has music for those who listen.

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

The man who is not permitted to own is owned.

The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.

The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests.

why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

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

The greatest drug of all, my dear, was not one of those pills in so many colors that you took over the years, was not the opium, the hash you smoked in houses at the beach, or the speed or smack you shot up in Sutherland's apartment, no, it wasn't any of these. It was the city, darling, it was the city, the city itself. And do you see why I had to leave? As Santayana said, dear, artists are unhappy because they are not interested in happiness; they live for beauty. God, was that steaming, loathsome city beautiful!!! And why finally no human lover was possible, because I was in love with all men, with the city itself.

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

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

Consciousness is a born hermit.

Depression is rage spread thin.

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad.

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.

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

All conditions are bearable, all dignities trumpery, and wisdom simply the gift of making the best of whatever is thrust upon us.

Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.

A man is morally free when...he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity

Criticism surprises the soul in the arms of convention.

Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.

The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about. Athletics don’t make anybody long-lived or useful.

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

The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.

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

A habitual indulgence in the inarticulate is a sure sign of the philosopher who has not learned to think, the poet who has not learned to write, the painter who has not learned to paint, and the impression that has not learned to express itself--all of which are compatible with an immensity of genius in the inexpressible soul.

What is the part of wisdom? To dream with one eye open; to be detatched from the world without being hostile to it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings, without forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are.

George Santayana: A man is morally free when … he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

The mistake we all make is in assuming anybody remembers anydamnthing from one day to the next. If that were true, we'd stop getting involved with approximately the same kind of wrong lover each time, we'd learn the lessons of history, the death penalty would discourage those plotting murder, and George Santayana's famous quote would be about as popular as "the bee's knees." But few of us keep accurate records of what we've learned as we hobble through life barking our shins in the dark on experiences we've already had....

With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.

The wisest man has something yet to learn.

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

We laughed at the same things, and we liked the same things. What more is needed for agreeable society?

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. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.

The contemporary world has turned its back on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably.

The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything.

The body must be loosely clad if the mind is to forget it and impetuously lead its own life.

We gain the insight to see ourselves through the friendships we make. They mirror us to ourselves. In them we see clearly what we do not have as well as what the world cannot do without. They do not judge us or condemn us or reject us. They hold us up while we grow, laughing and playing as we go. They bring us to the best of ourselves. “One’s friends,” George Santayana wrote, “are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

Those were the two prerequisites, in my conception, to perfect friendship: capacity to worship and capacity to laugh. Modern life is not made for friendship: common interests are not strong enough, private interests too absorbing. In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.

The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend, because he has not imagination enough to sympathize with their proper needs nor humility enough to respect them as if they were his own. Arrogance, fanaticism, meddlesomeness, and imperialism may then masquerade as philanthropy.

Wisdom lies in voluntary finitude and a timely change of heart: until maturity, multiplying the inclusions, up to the limit of natural faculty and moral harmony; afterwards, gladly relinquishing zone after zone of vegetation, and letting the snow-peak of integrity rise to what height it may.

When we feel the poetic thrill, is it not that we find sweep in the concise and depth in the clear, as we might find all the lights of the sea in the water of a jewel? And what is a philosophic thought but such an epitome?

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

Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.

There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

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

Time and Space are not prior to creation, they are forms under which creation becomes thinkable.

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

There was a distinct class of these gentlemen tramps, young men no longer young, who wouldn't settle down, who disliked polite society and the genteel conventions, but hadn't enough intelligence or enough conceit to think themselves transcendentalists or poets, in the style of Thoreau or of Walt Whitman.

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

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

And did not the degeneration of religion begin with reason itself? As Santayana says, the process of degeneration of religion was due to too much reasoning: “This religion unhappily long ago ceased to be wisdom expressed in fancy in order to become superstition overlaid with reasoning.” The decay of religion is due to the pedantic spirit, in the invention of creeds, formulas, articles of faith, doctrines and apologies. We become increasingly less pious as we increasingly justify and rationalize our beliefs and become so sure that we are right.

...I have read but little of Madame Glyn. I did not know that things like "It" were going on. I have misspent my days. When I think of all those hours I flung away in reading William James and Santayana, when I might have been reading of life, throbbing, beating, perfumed life, I practically break down. Where, I ask you, have I been, that no true word of Madame Glyn's literary feats has come to me? But even those far, far better informed than I must work a bit over the opening sentence of Madame Glyn's foreword to her novel" "This is not," the says, drawing her emeralds warmly about her, "the story of the moving picture entitled It, but a full character study of the story It, which the people in the picture read and discuss." I could go mad, in a nice way, straining to figure that out. ...Well it turns out that Ava and John meet, and he begins promptly to "vibrate with passion." ... ...It goes on for nearly three hundred pages, with both of them vibrating away like steam launches." -Review of the book, It, by Elinor Glyn. Review title: Madame Glyn Lectures on "It," with Illustrations; November 26, 1927.

I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, untravelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion.

The difficulty, after having the experience to symbolize, lies only in having enough imagination to suspend it in a thought; and further to give this thought such verbal expression that others may be able to decipher it, and to be stirred by it as by a wind of suggestion sweeping the whole forest of their memories.

It would be easy, however, to exaggerate the havoc wrought by such artificial conditions. The monotony we observe in mankind must not be charged to the oppressive influence of circumstances crushing the individual soul. It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation; and society, in imposing on them some chance language, some chance religion, and some chance career, first plants an ideal in their bosoms and insinuates into them a sort of racial or professional soul. Their only character is composed of the habits they have been led to acquire. Some little propensities betrayed in childhood may very probably survive; one man may prove by his dying words that he was congenitally witty, another tender, another brave.But these native qualities will simply have added an ineffectual tint to some typical existence or other; and the vast majority will remain, as Schopenhauer said, Fabrikwaaren der Natur.

Since the days of Descartes it has been a conception familiar to philosophers that every visible event in nature might be explained by previous visible events, and that all the motions, for instance, of the tongue in speech, or of the hand in painting, might have merely physical causes. If consciousness is thus accessory to life and not essential to it, the race of man might have existed upon the earth and acquired all the arts necessary for its subsistence without possessing a single sensation, idea, or emotion. Natural selection might have secured the survival of those automata which made useful reactions upon their environment. An instinct would have been developed, dangers would have been shunned without being feared, and injuries avenged without being felt.

William James (1842-1910) was the first philosopher in America to gain universal celebrity. The hardheaded practical wisdom of Benjamin Franklin could hardly be termed a philosophy; from an entirely different perspective, the obfuscatory maunderings of Emerson did not count as such, either. Something with a bit more intellectual rigor of the English or German sort was needed if Americans were not to feel that they were anything but the ruthless money-grubbing barbarians they in fact were and are. James filled the bill. His younger contemporary George Santayana (1863-1952) was considerably more brilliant and scintillating, but for regular, 100 percent Americans he had considerable drawbacks. In the first place, he was a foreigner, born in Spain, even though his Boston upbringing and Harvard professorship would otherwise have given him the stamp of approval. Moreover, he was not merely suspiciously interested in art and poetry (The Sense of Beauty [1896], Three Philosophical Poets [1910]), but he actually wrote poetry himself! No, he would never do. James, on the other hand, was just the sort of philosopher suited to the American bourgeoisie. His chief mission, expressed from one book to the next, was to protect their piety from the hostile forces of science and skepticism-an eminently laudable and American goal.