Quotes from George Santayana

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

The little word is has its tragedies; it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger. Whenever I use the word is, except in sheer tautology, I deeply misuse it; and when I discover my error, the world seems to fall asunder and the members of my family no longer know one another.

Oaths are the fossils of piety.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed.

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.

American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.

To the art of working well a civilized race would add the art of playing well.

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

Theory helps us bear our ignorance of facts.

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions their reasons are always different.

Columbus found a world, and had no chart, Save one that faith deciphered in the skies.

Knowledge is recognition of something absent it is a salutation, not an embrace.

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.

For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

He gave the world another world.

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.