George Santayana Quotes

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.

Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

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.

The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.

All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.

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

Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.

Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked.

I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.

Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.