Quotes by George Santayana

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

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.

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.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

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.

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

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

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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

Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

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

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.

Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.

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

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.