Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
“O WORLD, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise,. And on the inward vision close… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable,… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
O world, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
“Wisdom lies in voluntary finitude and a timely change of heart: until maturity, multiplying the inclusions, up to the limit of natural… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
“All conditions are bearable, all dignities trumpery, and wisdom simply the gift of making the best of whatever is thrust upon us.” — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil. — George Santayana Copy Share
To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language. — George Santayana Copy Share
“The contemporary world has turned its back on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably.” — George Santayana Copy Share
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… — George Santayana Copy Share
Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival; they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being… — George Santayana Copy Share
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth. — George Santayana Copy Share
Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had… — George Santayana Copy Share
Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a… — George Santayana Copy Share
Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood. — George Santayana Copy Share
Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others,… — George Santayana Copy Share
