George Santayana Quotes

Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble, it must remain rare, if common, it must become mean.

Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.

It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

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

The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without justice.

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

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.

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

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

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

[Everything] ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development.

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.

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable: what it is or what it means can never be said.

On fact, the whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.