Quotes by George Santayana

About George Santayana:

Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás is generally considered an American man of letters. At the age of forty-eight, Santayana left his position at Harvard and returned to Europe permanently, never to return to the United States. His last wish was to be buried in the Spanish pantheon in Rome.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepte...

George Santayana

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

George Santayana

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

George Santayana

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.

George Santayana
History quotes by George Santayana, UberQuotes

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

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

Sanity is madness put to good use.

George Santayana

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.

George Santayana

Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.

George Santayana

Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.

George Santayana

One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

George Santayana

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

Author Bio

  • NameGeorge Santayana
  • Description20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism
  • BornDecember 16, 1863
  • DiedSeptember 26, 1952
  • CountrySpain
  • ProfessionPhilosopher; Writer; Poet; Novelist; Essayist