The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas. — George Santayana Adversity Copy Share Image
People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world. — George Santayana Earth Copy Share Image
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are. — George Santayana Intelligence Copy Share Image
Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge. — George Santayana Assurance Copy Share Image
Man is not made to understand life, but to live it. — George Santayana Inspirational Copy Share Image
The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panza's who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and… — George Santayana Class Copy Share Image
The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see? — George Santayana Art Copy Share Image
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavour to understand him. — George Santayana Advice Copy Share Image
Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age. — George Santayana Age Copy Share Image
We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to… — George Santayana Aimlessness Copy Share Image
The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are… — 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 Age Copy Share Image
It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The truth properly means the sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities andrelations which… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction… — George Santayana Absolutes Copy Share Image
“The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend, because he has not imagination… — George Santayana Humanitarian Copy Share Image
Order, for a liberal, means only peace; and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the… — George Santayana Chiefs Copy Share Image
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it. — George Santayana Balance Copy Share Image
Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Love is at once more animal than friendship and more divine ... — George Santayana Animal Copy Share Image
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy. — George Santayana Hunger Copy Share Image
The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history. — George Santayana Actor Copy Share Image
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them. — George Santayana Freedom Copy Share Image
Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one. — George Santayana Aristocratic Copy Share Image
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. — George Santayana History Copy Share Image
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth. — George Santayana Military Copy Share Image
