George Santayana Quotes

La belleza, según la sentimos, es algo indescriptible; jamás puede decirse lo que es ni lo que significa.

Wer sich an die Vergangenheit nicht erinnert, ist dazu verdammt sie zu wiederholen.

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

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

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

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.

Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor.

There is a pleasure in the pattering of rain, and a joy in the sight of a growing plant.

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

Truth is only belived when someone has invented it well.

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

Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.

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.

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.

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.