George Santayana Quotes

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

Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.

The living have never shown me how to live.

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.

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.

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.

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

Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and British in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life, it now believes, is not the pursuit of liberty and happiness of all sorts by all sorts of different creatures; it is the development of a single spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each higher than the preceding one. No man, accordingly, can really or ultimately desire anything but what the best people desire. This is the principle of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all earnest liberals are higher snobs.

Prosperity, both for individuals and for states, means possessions; and possessions mean burdens and harness and slavery; and slavery for the mind, too, because it is not only the rich man's time that is pre-empted, but his affections, his judgement, and the range of his thoughts.

To the mind of the ancients, who knew something of such matters, liberty and prosperity seemed hardly compatible, yet modern liberalism wants them together.

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master.

England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humors.

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

Our dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole world is doing things.