Explore Quotes by George Santayana

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

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.

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

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.

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

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

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

Depression is rage spread thin.

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

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

America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.

When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.