George Santayana
53 quotations
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
America is a young country with an old mentality.
Habit is stronger than reason.
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
Music is essentially useless, as life is.
Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited.
If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.