George Santayana Quotes

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

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

Science is the response to the demand for information, and in it we ask for the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.

The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

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

Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.

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

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

Sanity is a madness put to good uses.

A picture you hold long enough in your head becomes your reality..

Liberalism has merely cleared a field in which every soul and every corporate interest may fight with every other for domination. Whoever is victorious in this struggle will make an end of liberalism; and the new order, which will deem itself saved, will have to defend itself in the following age against a new crop of rebels.

When man was in the world a wide-eyed boy,
And clouds of sorrow crossed his sky of joy
To scatter dewdrops on the buds of May.
Then could he work and love and fight and pray,
Nor heartsick grow in fortune's long employ.
Mighty to build and ruthless to destroy
He lived, while masked death unquestioned lay.
Now ponder we the ruins of the years,
And groan beneath the weight of boasted gain;
No unsung bacchanal can charm our ears
And lead our dances to the woodland fane,
No hope of heaven sweeten our few tears
And hush the importunity of pain.

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

Persons who feel themselves to be exiles in this world—and what noble mind, from Empedocles down, has not had that feeling?—are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.

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