Explore Quotes by George Santayana

The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.

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

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

Music is essentially useless, as is life.

Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.

It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.

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

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

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.