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.

The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don’t understand it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.