George Santayana
53 quotations
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.
The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.