Quotes from George Santayana

There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar, anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce stupidity

Mein Leben durchgestürmt; erst gross und mächtig, Nun aber geht es weise, geht bedächtig.

Every real object must cease to be what it seemed and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.

Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway.

It is wisdom to believe the heart.

Habit is stronger than reason.

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

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are content to repeat it.

There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.

Before he sets out, the traveller must possess fixed interests and facilities, to be served by travel. If he drifted aimlessly from country to country he would not travel but only wander, ramble as a tramp. The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere so his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.

Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.

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.

Man is not made to understand life, but to live it.

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one no less wise to balance it.

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

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