Quotes from George Santayana

The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

Sanity is a madness put to good uses.

The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

My atheism, like that of Spinoza , is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

To be interested in the changing seasons is . . . a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

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

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.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

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

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

Memory... is an internal rumor.

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

To know your future you must know your past

It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.