George Santayana Quotes

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

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

Ceux qui ne peuvent se souvenir du passé sont condamnés à le répéter.

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.

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.

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

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

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

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.

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

Therefore Whitman failed radically in his dearest ambition: he can never be a poet of the people. For the people, like the early races whose poetry was ideal, are natural believers in perfection. They have no doubts about the absolute desirability of wealth and learning and power, none about the worth of pure goodness and pure love. Their chosen poets, if they have any, will he always those who have known how to paint these ideals in lively even if in gaudy colours. Nothing is farther from the common people than the corrupt desire to be primitive. They instinctively look toward a more exalted life, which they imagine to be full of distinction and pleasure, and the idea of that brighter existence fills them with hope or with envy or with humble admiration.

If the people are ever won over to hostility to such ideals, it is only because they are cheated by demagogues who tell them that if all the flowers of civilization were destroyed its fruits would become more abundant. A greater share of happiness, people think, would fall to their lot could they destroy everything beyond their own possible possessions. But they are made thus envious and ignoble only by a deception: what they really desire is an ideal good for themselves which they are told they may secure by depriving others of their preeminence. Their hope is always to enjoy perfect satisfaction themselves; and therefore a poet who loves the picturesque aspects of labour and vagrancy will hardly be the poet of the poor. He may have described their figure and occupation, in neither of which they are much interested; he will not have read their souls. They will prefer to him any sentimental story-teller, any sensational dramatist any moralizing poet; for they are hero-worshippers by temperament, and are too wise or too unfortunate to be much enamoured of themselves or of the conditions of their existence.

In solitude it is possible to love mankind; in the world, for one who knows the world, there can be nothing but secret or open war.

It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy;

Religions are not true or false, but better or worse.

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