“We laughed at the same things, and we liked the same things. What more is needed for agreeable society?” — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Great is this organism of mud and fire, terrible this vast, painful, glorious experiment — George Santayana Biology 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 Advice Copy Share Image
For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned — George Santayana Fashion Copy Share Image
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason. — George Santayana Customs Copy Share Image
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life. — George Santayana Art Copy Share Image
You cannot prove realism to a complete sceptic or idealist; but you can show an honest man that he is not a… — George Santayana Alive 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
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
To most people, I fancy, the stars are beautiful; but if you asked why, they would be at a loss to reply,… — George Santayana Astronomy Copy Share Image
Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us… — George Santayana 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
“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
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal. — George Santayana Art Copy Share Image
All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong,… — George Santayana Life Copy Share Image
Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous. — George Santayana Heaven Copy Share Image
The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality. — George Santayana Child Copy Share Image
If clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone… — George Santayana Animal Copy Share Image
The profoundest affinities are the most readily felt; they remain a background and standard for all happiness and if we trace them… — George Santayana Affinity Copy Share Image
By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering… — George Santayana Body Copy Share Image
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the… — George Santayana Irrational Copy Share Image
We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world. — George Santayana Events Copy Share Image
Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger. — George Santayana Depth Copy Share Image
It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering… — George Santayana Beauty Copy Share Image
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles. — George Santayana Boston Copy Share Image
Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired. — George Santayana Copy Share Image
Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes,… — George Santayana Copy Share Image
![“To most people, I fancy, the stars are beautiful; but if you asked why, they would be at a loss to reply, until they remembered what they had heard about astronomy, and the great size and distance and possible habitation of those orbs. ... [We] persuade ourselves that the power of the starry…” quote by George Santayana](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/i/603/george-santayana-478_astronomy_to-most-people-i-fancy-the-stars-are-bea_192902.png)
