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George Santayana Quotes

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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

George Santayana
Past, Infancy Is, History
"The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress", Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense by George Santayana, 1905-1906.

A country without a memory is a country of madmen.

George Santayana
Inspirational, Motivational, Country

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

George Santayana
Inspirational, Life, Philosophical

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

George Santayana
Fear, Lying, People

The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again

George Santayana
Doe, Remember, Bounds

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal.

George Santayana
Stupidity, Meanness, Ideals
George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.59, 谷月社

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

George Santayana
Inspirational, Goal, Effort
The Life of Reason vol. 1, introduction (1905)

The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

George Santayana
Truth, Freedom, Liberty
Little Essays (1920) "Ideal Immortality"

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

George Santayana
Education, Teacher, Children
George Santayana (1950). “Atoms of Thought: An Anthology of Thoughts”

Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.

George Santayana
God, Space, Heaven
George Santayana, Marianne S. Wokeck, Martin A. Coleman, James Gouinlock (2011). “The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense, Volume VII, Book One”, p.75, MIT Press

Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.

George Santayana
Passion, Thinking, Fancy
George Santayana, Martin A. Coleman (2009). “The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings”, p.129, Indiana University Press

To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.

George Santayana
Religious, Language, Speak

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.

George Santayana
Motivational, Perseverance, Courage
Quoted in Reader's Digest, Nov. 1939 See Calonne 1; Nansen 1; Trollope 3

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.

George Santayana
Men, Laughing, Savages

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.

George Santayana
Inspirational, Common Sense, Nonsense
George Santayana (2012). “The Sense of Beauty”, p.153, Courier Corporation

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

George Santayana
Inspirational, Life, Birthday
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies "War Shrines" (1922)

Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.

George Santayana
Equilibrium, Idiocy, Universe
George Santayana (1944). “Persons and Places”

Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.

George Santayana
Imagination, Religion, Atheism

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

George Santayana
Graduation, Wisdom, Diversity
George Santayana (1936). “The Works of George Santayana”

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

George Santayana
Happiness, Laughter, Mad
Life of Reason (1905) vol. 1, ch. 10

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.

George Santayana
Future, Past, Welcome

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.

George Santayana
Change, Children, Persistence
George Santayana (2011). “The Life of Reason: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense”, p.172, MIT Press

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panza's who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixote's with a sense for ideals, but mad.

George Santayana
Reality, Class, Two
George Santayana (1936). “The Works of George Santayana”

Habit is stronger than reason.

George Santayana
Smoking, Stronger, Opinion
George Santayana (1936). “The Works of George Santayana: Interpretations of the poetry and religion. Hamlet. Shelley. Dickens. Tragic philosophy”

He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.

George Santayana
Believe, Thinking, Vision
George Santayana (2013). “Scepticism and Animal Faith”, p.201, Courier Corporation

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