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George Santayana Inspirational Quotes (276)

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Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.
George Santayana
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Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.
George Santayana
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Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
George Santayana
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Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome.
George Santayana
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Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
George Santayana
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One of the peculiarities of recent speculation, especially in America, is that ideas are abandoned in virtue of a mere change of feeling, without any new evidence or new arguments. We do not nowadays refute our predecessors, we pleasantly bid them good-bye.
George Santayana
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Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual.
George Santayana
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The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.
George Santayana
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Our character ... is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and nobler that destiny is likely to be.
George Santayana
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The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
George Santayana
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Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
George Santayana
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Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.
George Santayana
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Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
George Santayana
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History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
George Santayana
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Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.
George Santayana
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In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.
George Santayana
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Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.
George Santayana
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It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods.
George Santayana
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Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.
George Santayana
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To fight is a radical instinct if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.
George Santayana
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... so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not selected it is recognised and obeyed.
George Santayana
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The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
George Santayana
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Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom - picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode - may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair.
George Santayana
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It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.
George Santayana
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