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Those Who Cannot Remember the Past are Condemned to Repeat it
George Santayana was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. A lifelong Spanish citizen, Santayana was raised and educated in the United States and identified himself as an American. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters.
Philosopher | Spanish
Born: 1863-12-16 in Madrid, Spain
Died: September 26, 1952 in Rome, Italy
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
George Santayana
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate they are green and vigorous in old age.
George Santayana
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
George Santayana
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
George Santayana
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
George Santayana
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
George Santayana
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
George Santayana
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
George Santayana
Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
George Santayana
A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
George Santayana
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
George Santayana
For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.
George Santayana
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
George Santayana
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
George Santayana
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
George Santayana
A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
George Santayana
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
George Santayana
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
George Santayana
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
George Santayana
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
George Santayana
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
George Santayana
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
George Santayana
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
George Santayana
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
George Santayana
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another people are friends in spots.
George Santayana
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
George Santayana
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
George Santayana
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.
George Santayana
Happiness is the only sanction of life where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
George Santayana
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
George Santayana
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
George Santayana
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
George Santayana
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
George Santayana
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
George Santayana
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
George Santayana
Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent it is a salutation, not an embrace.
George Santayana
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
George Santayana
Knowledge is recognition of something absent it is a salutation, not an embrace.
George Santayana
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
George Santayana
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
George Santayana
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions their reasons are always different.
George Santayana
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
George Santayana
Music is essentially useless, as is life.
George Santayana
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
George Santayana
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
George Santayana
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
George Santayana
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
George Santayana
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
George Santayana
Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.
George Santayana
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
George Santayana
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
George Santayana
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
George Santayana
Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.
George Santayana
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
George Santayana
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.
George Santayana
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
George Santayana
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
George Santayana
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
George Santayana
It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.
George Santayana
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
George Santayana
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
George Santayana
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
George Santayana
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
George Santayana
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
George Santayana
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
George Santayana
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions their reasons are always different.
George Santayana
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions their reasons are always different.
George Santayana