Life Quotes by George Santayana

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

— George Santayana

All spiritual interests are supported by animal life.

— George Santayana

The living have never shown me how to live.

— George Santayana

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

— George Santayana

A simple life is its own reward.

— George Santayana

“Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.”

— George Santayana

Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.

— George Santayana

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

— George Santayana

The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.

— George Santayana

“I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life; I should not be honest otherwise.”

— George Santayana

The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.

— George Santayana

What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like?

— George Santayana

To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of its content.

— George Santayana

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to…

— George Santayana

Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine…

— George Santayana

The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than…

— George Santayana

The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement…

— George Santayana

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's…

— George Santayana

All his life he [the American] jumps into the train after it has started and jumps out before it has stopped; and…

— George Santayana

The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine… If we dramatize its life and conceive…

— George Santayana

A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world; and when not too much…

— George Santayana

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to…

— George Santayana

When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who…

— George Santayana

“Those were the two prerequisites, in my conception, to perfect friendship: capacity to worship and capacity to laugh. Modern life is not…

— George Santayana

The human race, in its intellectual life, is organized like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and essentially…

— George Santayana

I love moving water, I love ships, I love the sharp definition, the concentrated humanity, the sublime solitude of life at sea.…

— George Santayana

Any attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall…

— George Santayana

“What ought to be imperfect in time is, because of its very imperfection there, perfect when viewed under the form of eternity.…

— George Santayana

Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo, The Last Puritan,…

— George Santayana

“Masks are arrested expressions and admirable echoes of feeling, at once faithful, discrete, and superlative. Living things in contact with the air…

— George Santayana

“Now the zest of romanticism consists in taking what you know is an independent and ancient world as if it were material…

— George Santayana

Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.

— George Santayana

It is the acme of life to understand life.

— George Santayana

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

— George Santayana

Man is not made to understand life, but to live it.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana