Quotes from George Santayana

Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.

It is one thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagination.

A fanatical imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel.

I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.

Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.

To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.

The worship of power is an old religion.

Prayer among sane people has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.