Quotes by George Santayana

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

The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.

With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.

The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,She makes a sweeter music than is heard.

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

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.

Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.

Consciousness is a born hermit.

The earth has its music for those who will listen.

The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its total temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition; and candor and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost.

Music is essentially useless, as life is.

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

Depression is rage spread thin.

The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.

The man who is not permitted to own is owned.

Sanity is a madness put to good uses.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colors of life in all their purity.

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