George Santayana Quotes

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

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

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

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

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.

To know your future you must know your past

It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

The bible is literature, not dogma.

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

The muffled syllables that Nature speaks
Fill us with deeper longing for her word;
She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,
She makes a sweeter music than is heard.

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