George Santayana

Depression is rage spread thin.

— George Santayana

There is no dunce like a mature dunce.

— George Santayana

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

— George Santayana

Sanity is a madness put to good uses

— George Santayana

Sanity is a madness put to good use.

— George Santayana

Habit is stronger than reason.

— George Santayana

One real world is enough.

— George Santayana

It is wisdom to believe the heart.

— George Santayana

I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.

— George Santayana

It is one thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagination.

— George Santayana

Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything.

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

“The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.

— George Santayana

All spiritual interests are supported by animal life.

— George Santayana

Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it…

— George Santayana

Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.

— George Santayana

Words are weapons, and it is dangerous in speculation, as in politics, to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.

— George Santayana

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribebale, what it is or what it means can never be said.

— George Santayana

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

— 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 sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a…

— George Santayana

The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and…

— George Santayana

Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience…

— 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

Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old…

— 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

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 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 tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is…

— George Santayana

Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless…

— George Santayana

“To the uninitiated they have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave of the hand: What! are you still troubled…

— George Santayana

Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Awe very properly…

— George Santayana

“Since the days of Descartes it has been a conception familiar to philosophers that every visible event in nature might be explained…

— George Santayana

It would be hard to conceive a system of instincts more nicely adjusted, where the constituents should represent or support one another…

— 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

Incapacity to appreciate certain types of beauty may be the condition sine qua non for the appreciation of another kind; the greatest…

— George Santayana

With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by…

— 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