Quotes from George Santayana

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

Depression is rage spread thin.

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

Sanity is madness put to good use.

Better not be a hero than work oneself up into heroism by shouting lies.

Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.

Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.

The pride of the artisan in his art and its uses is pride in himself...It is in his skill and ability to make things as he wishes them to be that he rejoices.

Art is a delayed echo.

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.

Beauty is objectified pleasure.

Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.

To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful.

All beauties are to be honored, but only one embraced.

It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.

Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

The family is one of nature's masterpieces

The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different