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.
—George Santayana
Topics: Blessings, Gratitude, Appreciation
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
—George Santayana
Topics: Society
What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like?
—George Santayana
Topics: Body
The loneliest woman in the world is a woman without a close woman friend.
—George Santayana
Topics: Friendship
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
—George Santayana
Topics: Sacrifice
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
—George Santayana
Topics: Possessions, Property
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it
—George Santayana
Topics: Dreams
To the art of working well a civilized race would add that art of playing well.
—George Santayana
I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
—George Santayana
Topics: Liberty, Simplicity
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
—George Santayana
Topics: Prayer
England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humors.
—George Santayana
Topics: Britain
A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
—George Santayana
Topics: Assumptions, Theory
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
—George Santayana
Topics: Truth
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
—George Santayana
Topics: Emotions
The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
—George Santayana
Topics: Wives, Marriage
The degree in which a poet’s imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity
—George Santayana
Topics: Reality
Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
—George Santayana
Topics: Sanity
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, knowing that once it was all that was humanly possible.
—George Santayana
Topics: Future, The Past, Past
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.
—George Santayana
Topics: Atheism
Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited.
—George Santayana
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
—George Santayana
Topics: Quotations, Wisdom, Balance, Proverbs, Proverbial Wisdom
In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
—George Santayana
Topics: Change
To cement a new friendship, especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world, a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person, and cut across the accidents of place and time.
—George Santayana
Topics: Friendship
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
—George Santayana
Topics: Determination
The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine…. If we dramatize its life and conceive its spirit, we are filled with wonder, terror and amusement, so magnificent is the spirit.
—George Santayana
Topics: Space, World
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
—George Santayana
Topics: Effort, Fanaticism
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
—George Santayana
Topics: Vulgarity, Swearing, Promises, Profanity
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
—George Santayana
Topics: Art
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
—George Santayana
Topics: History, Historians
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
—George Santayana
Topics: Sadness, Unhappiness
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Bahya ibn Paquda Jewish Philosopher
- Miguel de Unamuno Spanish Philosopher, Writer
- Charles Sanders Peirce American Philosopher
- Jacinto Benavente Spanish Dramatist
- Lope de Vega Spanish Playwright, Poet
- John Dewey American Philosopher
- William James American Philosopher
- Miguel de Cervantes Spanish Novelist
- Pablo Picasso Spanish Painter
- Will Durant American Historian, Philosopher
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