Quotes from George Santayana

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

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.

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.

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.

[Self-]assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions their reasons are always different.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that "a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.

Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it...

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude is, in one sense, overcome.

The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.

When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind…. They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country.

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.