Quotes from George Santayana

Man's most serious activity is play.

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.

The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.

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

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

Nothing you can lose by dying is half as precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility.

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.

Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavour to understand him.

Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.

Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends.

It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.

To the art of working well a civilized race would add the art of playing well.

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

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

Oaths are the fossils of piety. The geologist recognizes in them the relics of a once active devotion, but they are now only counters and pebbles tossed about in the unconscious play of expression. The lighter and more constant their use, the less their meaning.

The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.

Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one's powers.