George Santayana Quotations

George Santayana

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.

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

An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.

Depression is rage spread thin.

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.

I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.

Man is constrained to be more or less social by his mode of propagation.

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

Nothing is so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

Sanity is a madness put to good uses.

Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.

There is no cure for birth or death save to enjoy the interval.

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.