Men Quotes by George Santayana

Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.

— George Santayana

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

— George Santayana

Man's most serious activity is play.

— George Santayana

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive

— George Santayana

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavour to understand him.

— George Santayana

Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?

— George Santayana

It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

— George Santayana

With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

— George Santayana

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

— George Santayana

Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly…

— George Santayana

There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.

— George Santayana

Each religion necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself. Religions, like languages, are necessary rivals. What religion a man shall…

— George Santayana

Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all…

— George Santayana

If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he…

— George Santayana

Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence…

— George Santayana

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own…

— George Santayana

What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not…

— George Santayana

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and…

— George Santayana

What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word--the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man…

— 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

Logic, like language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of symbolizing and harnessing in expression the existing diversities of…

— George Santayana

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that 'a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in…

— George Santayana

The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his…

— George Santayana

Man alone knows that he must die; but that very knowledge raises him, in a sense, above mortality, by making him a…

— George Santayana

Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds…

— George Santayana

It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility

— George Santayana

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.

— George Santayana

The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy…

— George Santayana

A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.

— George Santayana

Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.

— George Santayana

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

— George Santayana

Nothing you can lose by dying is half as precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility.

— George Santayana

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

— George Santayana

Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.

— George Santayana

The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye…

— George Santayana

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.

— George Santayana

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

— George Santayana