Quotes by

George Santayana

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig. – George Santayana

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome. – George Santayana

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself. – George Santayana

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

Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited. – George Santayana

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation. – George Santayana

Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled. – George Santayana

By natures kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a mans power to answer do not occur to him at all. – George Santayana

The degree in which a poets imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity. – George Santayana

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who werent there. – George Santayana

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of ones life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted. – George Santayana

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions their reasons are always different. – George Santayana

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy. – George Santayana

Only the dead have seen the end of the war. – George Santayana

It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases. – George Santayana

The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it. – George Santayana

Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on. – George Santayana

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads. – George Santayana

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth. – George Santayana

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman. – George Santayana