George Santayana Quotes

It is time some genius should appear to reconstitute the shattered picture of the world. He should live in the continual presence of all experience, and respect it; he should at the same time understand nature, the ground of that experience; and he should also have a delicate sense for the ideal echoes of his own passions, and for all the colours of his possible happiness. All that can inspire a poet is contained in this task, and nothing less than this task would exhaust a poet’s inspiration. We may hail this needed genius from afar. Like the poets in Dante’s limbo, when Virgil returns among them, we may salute him, saying: Onorate l’altissimo poeta. Honour the most high poet, honour the highest possible poet. But this supreme poet is in limbo still.

Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

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.

Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind.

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.

I like to walk about amidst 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.

At the prompting of some stray instinct or chance association, you will invent delightful or fearsome circumstances, identifying them, with the most shameful doubleness, with the real ones...you will burst into passionate eloquence, or pant in the direst predicament, all for the fun of it, or by virtue of a terrible inner compulsion; and this dream which is byplay, or play which is a waking dream, will exhibit your brooding soul, if not always to moral advantage or with much coherence, at least in its unsuspected ingenuities of invention. What brilliant images, what subtle emotions, what dramatic turns in the argument of a dream, and in the make-believe of children! You seem to dictate and compose your fiction deliberately, rejecting, foreseeing, feeling the oncoming revolution towards which circumstances must be addressed.

To know your future you must know your past

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

No doubt the spirit or energy of the world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves.

The tendency of everything to maintain and propagate its nature is simply the inertia of a stable juxtaposition of elements, which are not enough disturbed by ordinary accidents to lose their equilibrium; while the incident of a too great disturbance causes that disruption we call death , or that variation of type , which , on account of it's incapacity to establish itself permanently, we call abnormal. Nature thus organizes herself into recognizable species ; and the aesthetic eye ,studying her forms ,tends ,as we have already shown , to bring the type within even narrower limits than do the external exigencies of life

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

The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.

Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.