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George Santayana Quotes about Past

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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.

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

My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

George Santayana
Character, Past, Historical Novels
George Santayana, Martin A. Coleman (2009). “The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings”, p.62, Indiana University Press

Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.

George Santayana
Memories, Past, Echoes
George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.375, 谷月社

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.

George Santayana
Character, Past, Order
George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.380, 谷月社

There is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made us ashamed of ourselves when it was happening: there is a pleasant panoramic sense of what it all was and how it all had to be. Why, if we are not vain or snobbish, need we desire that it should have been different? The better things we missed may yet be enjoyed or attained by someone else somewhere: why isn't that just as good? And there is no regret, either, in the sense of wishing the past to return, or missing it: it is quite real enough as it is, there at its own date and place.

George Santayana
Regret, Real, Past
"The Letters of George Santayana".

Those who cannot remember the pastare condemned to repeat it. or: Those who have never heard of good system development practice are condemned to reinvent it.

George Santayana
Past, Practice, Development

It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.

George Santayana
Beauty, Past, Comfort
George Santayana, Marianne S. Wokeck, Martin A. Coleman, James Gouinlock (2015). “The Life of Reason Or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Art, Volume VII, Book Four”, p.118, MIT Press

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