Quotes from George Santayana

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.

I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

The earth has music for those who listen.

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

The man who is not permitted to own is owned.

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.

why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.

The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.

All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible

A habitual indulgence in the inarticulate is a sure sign of the philosopher who has not learned to think, the poet who has not learned to write, the painter who has not learned to paint, and the impression that has not learned to express itself--all of which are compatible with an immensity of genius in the inexpressible soul.

Depression is rage spread thin.

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

Consciousness is a born hermit.

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad.

Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.

All conditions are bearable, all dignities trumpery, and wisdom simply the gift of making the best of whatever is thrust upon us.

Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.

The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about. Athletics don't make anybody long-lived or useful.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.