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George Santayana

55 quotes

George Santayana (1863–1952) was a Spanish-American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist known for his elegant prose and incisive cultural commentary. His famous warning — "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" — is one of the most quoted lines in the English language.

“The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.”

— George Santayana

Beauty

All Quotes by George Santayana

“Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.”

— George Santayana

Experience

“It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.”

— George Santayana

Art

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

— George Santayana

Art

“Music is essentially useless, as is life.”

— George Santayana

Music

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

— George Santayana

History

“The family is one of nature's masterpieces.”

— George Santayana

Family

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

— George Santayana

Science

“The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.”

— George Santayana

Art

“It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.”

— George Santayana

Truth

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

— George Santayana

Religion

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

— George Santayana

Truth

“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.”

— George Santayana

Future

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

— George Santayana

Friendship

“Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.”

— George Santayana

Money

“Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.”

— George Santayana

Music

“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.”

— George Santayana

Knowledge

“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.”

— George Santayana

Peace

“Wisdom comes by disillusionment.”

— George Santayana

Wisdom

“The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.”

— George Santayana

Education

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

— George Santayana

Women