George Santayana Quotes

"The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence"

"For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity."

"The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form."

"The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine"

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

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

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

"The Soul is the voice of the body's interests."

"In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality. The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral."

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

"Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better."

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

"Habit is stronger than reason"

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

"O World, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise, And on the inward vision close the eyes, But it is wisdom to believe the heart."

"Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel."

"Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on."

"The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations."

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

"Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure."