Quotes from George Santayana

I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.

Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.

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 speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

Un om este liber din punct de vedere moral când [...] judec? lumea ÅŸi îi judec? pe ceilalÅ£i oameni cu o sinceritate care nu face compromisuri.

La belleza, según la sentimos, es algo indescriptible; jamás puede decirse lo que es ni lo que significa.

The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its total temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition; and candor and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost.

faith in the intellect...is the only faith yet sanctioned by its fruits

The ultimate intuitions on which ethics rests are not debatable, for they are not opinions we hazard but preferences we feel; and it can neither be correct nor incorrect that we feel them.

To the uninitiated they have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave of the hand: What! are you still troubled by that? Or if compelled to be so scholastic as to labour the point they have explained, as usual, that oneself cannot be the absolute because the idea of oneself, to arise, must be contrasted with other ideas. Therefore, you cannot well have the idea of a world in which nothing appears but the idea of yourself.

Science is the response to the demand for information, and in it we ask for the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.

A picture you hold long enough in your head becomes your reality..

Wer sich an die Vergangenheit nicht erinnert, ist dazu verdammt sie zu wiederholen.

In his biggest sacrifices, man finds the biggest fulfillment

Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends : have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.

A good citizen must follow the movement of public affairs, so as to cast his vote intelligently, and know whether the party in power deserved his vote.

Chi non conosce la storia è condannato a ripeterla.

He described what he knew best or had heard most, and felt he had described the universe. (on Hegel)

Free government works well in proportion as government is superfluous.

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

Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

Moreover, in my own way, I have discerned in pure Being the involution of all forms. As felt, pure Being may be indeterminate, but as conceived reflectively it includes all determinations: so that when deployed into the realm of essence, infinite or indeterminate Being truly contains entertainment for all eternity.