Explore Quotes by George Santayana

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

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

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.

Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.

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.

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.

Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavour to understand him.

The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.

The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.

Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

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.

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.

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

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

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

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

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.