Quotes from George Santayana

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.

England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humours.

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are friends in spots.

It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the part known gives us evidence enough that the unknown part cannot be much amiss.

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.

There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.

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

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

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.

Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.

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

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

Habit is stronger than reason

The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence

Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited.