George Santayana Quotes

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George Santayana

Profession : Philosopher

Birth : December 16, 1863

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.

George Santayana

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.

George Santayana

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

George Santayana

Sanity is madness put to good use.

George Santayana

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.

George Santayana

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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

It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.

George Santayana

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

George Santayana

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

George Santayana

If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.

George Santayana

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

George Santayana

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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

George Santayana

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

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 accepted.

George Santayana