Quotes by George Santayana

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

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

To knock a thing down especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle is a deep delight to the blood.

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

Before you contradict an old man my fair friend you should endeavour to understand him.

Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age. In writing Dialogues in Limbo The Last Puritan and now all these descriptions of the friends of my youth and the young friends of my middle age I have drunk the pleasure of life more pure more joyful than it ever was when mingled with all the hidden anxieties and little annoyances of actual living. Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.

If artists and poets are unhappy it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.

Art is a delayed echo.

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable what it is or what it means can never be said.

In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.

There is nothing to which men while they have food and drink cannot reconcile themselves.

Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die which is mans charter of nobility.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

England is the paradise of individuality eccentricity heresy anomalies hobbies and humours.

The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another people are friends in spots.