George Santayana quotes Born: 12/16/1863 Died: 09/26/1952

• Love is only half the illusion; the lover, but not his love, is deceived. (George Santayana) [love/love]
• Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. (George Santayana)
• 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. (George Santayana) [future/willpower/past/respect]
• 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. (George Santayana) [universe/men/human]
• Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men. (George Santayana) [people/people/men]
• Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots. (George Santayana) [mind/people]
• Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. (George Santayana) [remember/past]
• Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness. (George Santayana) [knowledge/happiness]
• The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise. (George Santayana) [more/absolute/beauty]
• Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world. (George Santayana) [music/form/feelings]
• Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are. (George Santayana) [intelligence]
• Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion. (George Santayana) [religion/taste/human/pleasure]
• Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him. (George Santayana)
• To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman. (George Santayana) [delight/war/soldier/quality]
• The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations. (George Santayana) [foundations]
• Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles. (George Santayana)
• There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity. (George Santayana) [death/death/life]
• Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies. (George Santayana) [paradise]
• Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience. (George Santayana) [conscience]
• The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool. (George Santayana) [willpower/fool]
• Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself. (George Santayana)
• Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand. (George Santayana)
• Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end. (George Santayana) [start]
• Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds. (George Santayana) [chaos/order]
• The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him. (George Santayana) [destroy]
• The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family. (George Santayana) [family/class/bees/family]
• The highest form of vanity is love of fame. (George Santayana) [form/vanity/love/fame]
• Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit. (George Santayana) [fashion/innovation/benefit]
• History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. (George Santayana) [needs]
• The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer. (George Santayana)
• The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything. (George Santayana) [human/mind]

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