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Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.
~ George Santayana Quote

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 Quote

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
~ George Santayana Quote

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
~ George Santayana Quote

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 Quote

Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
~ George Santayana Quote

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
~ George Santayana Quote

It is wisdom to believe the heart.
~ George Santayana Quote

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of other
~ George Santayana Quote

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
~ George Santayana Quote

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
~ George Santayana Quote

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.
~ George Santayana Quote

England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies and humours.
~ George Santayana Quote

There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
~ George Santayana Quote

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
~ George Santayana Quote

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
~ George Santayana Quote

Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility.
~ George Santayana Quote

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 Quote

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.
~ George Santayana Quote

Happiness is the only sanction in life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
~ George Santayana Quote

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
~ George Santayana Quote

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

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
~ George Santayana Quote

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
~ George Santayana Quote

If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.
~ George Santayana Quote

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
~ George Santayana Quote

A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
~ George Santayana Quote

America is a young country with an old mentality.
~ George Santayana Quote

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
~ George Santayana Quote

Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principles to trifles.
~ George Santayana Quote

Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.
~ George Santayana Quote

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
~ George Santayana Quote

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
~ George Santayana Quote

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

By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.
~ George Santayana Quote

All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
~ George Santayana Quote

A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.
~ George Santayana Quote

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
~ George Santayana Quote

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 Quote

Art is a delayed echo.
~ George Santayana Quote

If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
~ George Santayana Quote

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are content to repeat it.
~ George Santayana Quote

Work and love - these are the basics; waking life is a dream controlled.
~ George Santayana Quote

Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.
~ George Santayana Quote

Every real object must cease to be what it seemed and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.
~ George Santayana Quote

Depression is rage spread thin.
~ George Santayana Quote

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
~ George Santayana Quote

For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.
~ George Santayana Quote

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood.
~ George Santayana Quote

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
~ George Santayana Quote

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
~ George Santayana Quote

If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.
~ George Santayana Quote

Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
~ George Santayana Quote

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
~ George Santayana Quote

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
~ George Santayana Quote

In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
~ George Santayana Quote

It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility.
~ George Santayana Quote

Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
~ George Santayana Quote

Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
~ George Santayana Quote

If all the arts aspire to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
~ George Santayana Quote

I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.
~ George Santayana Quote

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness
~ George Santayana Quote

The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
~ George Santayana Quote

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out, and minutely articulated.
~ George Santayana Quote

Habit is stronger than reason.
~ George Santayana Quote

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 Quote

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

Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
~ George Santayana Quote

Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway.
~ George Santayana Quote

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 Quote

There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.
~ George Santayana Quote

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
~ George Santayana Quote

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
~ George Santayana Quote

Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
~ George Santayana Quote

Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
~ George Santayana Quote

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

An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
~ George Santayana Quote

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 Quote