Quotes from George Santayana

Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.

Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.

The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.

Science is nothing but developed perception interpreted intent common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.

The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship , religion , science , and art .

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.

It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.

Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely a vehicle for joy.

All spiritual interests are supported by animal life.

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.

The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.

Music is essentially useless, as life is; but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.

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