Quotes by George Santayana

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.

Prayer among sane people has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

Progress far from consisting in change depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are content to repeat it.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast it is a predicament.

Each religion by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.

My atheism like that of Spinoza is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.

Work and love - these are the basics waking life is a dream controlled.

If all the arts aspire to the condition of music all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

Science is nothing but developed perception interpreted intent common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.

If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.

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

Before he sets out the traveller must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel. If he drifted aimlessly from country to country he would not travel but only wander ramble as a tramp. The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere so his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.

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

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one no less wise to balance it.

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.

The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.

The family is one of natures masterpieces.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.