Quotes from George Santayana

Those were the two prerequisites, in my conception, to perfect friendship: capacity to worship and capacity to laugh. Modern life is not made for friendship: common interests are not strong enough, private interests too absorbing. In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.

Wisdom lies in voluntary finitude and a timely change of heart: until maturity, multiplying the inclusions, up to the limit of natural faculty and moral harmony; afterwards, gladly relinquishing zone after zone of vegetation, and letting the snow-peak of integrity rise to what height it may.

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.

The wisest man has something yet to learn.

We laughed at the same things, and we liked the same things. What more is needed for agreeable society?

The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything.

The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend, because he has not imagination enough to sympathize with their proper needs nor humility enough to respect them as if they were his own. Arrogance, fanaticism, meddlesomeness, and imperialism may then masquerade as philanthropy.

There was a distinct class of these gentlemen tramps, young men no longer young, who wouldn't settle down, who disliked polite society and the genteel conventions, but hadn't enough intelligence or enough conceit to think themselves transcendentalists or poets, in the style of Thoreau or of Walt Whitman.

The contemporary world has turned its back on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably.

I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea. The dangers of it only make present to us the peril inherent in all existence, which the stupid, ignorant, untravelled land-worm never discovers; and the art of it, so mathematical, so exact, so rewarding to intelligence, appeals to courage and clears the mind of superstition, while filling it with humility and true religion.

When we feel the poetic thrill, is it not that we find sweep in the concise and depth in the clear, as we might find all the lights of the sea in the water of a jewel? And what is a philosophic thought but such an epitome?

The body must be loosely clad if the mind is to forget it and impetuously lead its own life.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

The difficulty, after having the experience to symbolize, lies only in having enough imagination to suspend it in a thought; and further to give this thought such verbal expression that others may be able to decipher it, and to be stirred by it as by a wind of suggestion sweeping the whole forest of their memories.

To knock a thing down when it is cocked at an arrogant angle is a deep delight of the blood.

There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.

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

Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.

Time and Space are not prior to creation, they are forms under which creation becomes thinkable.

Life is an art not to be learned by observation.

O WORLD, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise,. And on the inward vision close the eyes,. But it is wisdom to believe the heart.

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life; I should not be honest otherwise.