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The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness, and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.


George Santayana

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QUEEN ELIZABETH II

More George Santayana

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
GEORGE SANTAYANA History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.
GEORGE SANTAYANA A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
GEORGE SANTAYANA When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
GEORGE SANTAYANA A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradicti...
GEORGE SANTAYANA We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past,...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Sanity is madness put to good use.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. when experience is not retained, ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Every actual animal is somewhat dull and somewhat mad. He will at times miss his signals and stare v...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The truth is cruel, but it can be loved and it makes free those who have loved it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
GEORGE SANTAYANA To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crim...
GEORGE SANTAYANA It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death on...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are fri...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live witho...
GEORGE SANTAYANA There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death sup...
GEORGE SANTAYANA It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The g...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
GEORGE SANTAYANA One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another: people are frien...
GEORGE SANTAYANA That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subj...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Sanity is a madness put to good uses.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old ag...
GEORGE SANTAYANA In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflecti...
GEORGE SANTAYANA It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of th...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a v...
GEORGE SANTAYANA If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone f...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, an...
GEORGE SANTAYANA A man's feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
GEORGE SANTAYANA There is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blo...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the bett...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot thr...
GEORGE SANTAYANA A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeab...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under w...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.
GEORGE SANTAYANA There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to pres...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The empiricist... thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at s...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
GEORGE SANTAYANA I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Habit is stronger than reason.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute th...
GEORGE SANTAYANA History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without bene...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special se...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
GEORGE SANTAYANA There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.
GEORGE SANTAYANA It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Oaths are the fossils of piety.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sens...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Nonsense is good only because common sense is so limited.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Depression is rage spread thin.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
GEORGE SANTAYANA To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occu...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happi...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in t...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentabl...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
GEORGE SANTAYANA It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of t...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience — the u...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part of another; people are frien...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the f...
GEORGE SANTAYANA To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, f...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
GEORGE SANTAYANA There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
GEORGE SANTAYANA There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited
GEORGE SANTAYANA One real world is enough.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Progress, far from consisting of change, depends on retentiveness... Those who cannot remember the...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little long...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian...
GEORGE SANTAYANA To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love wi...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Words are weapons, and it is dangerous . . . to borrow them from the arsenal of the enemy.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Sanity is a madness put to good use.
GEORGE SANTAYANA There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The universe, as far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to it...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Music is essentially useless, as life is.
GEORGE SANTAYANA What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when known, so deeply tinge what we th...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should de...
GEORGE SANTAYANA For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
GEORGE SANTAYANA To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humo...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes som...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
GEORGE SANTAYANA My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects i...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the anci...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recog...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and, were it not assumed, the most i...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing t...
GEORGE SANTAYANA There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval
GEORGE SANTAYANA America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
GEORGE SANTAYANA It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the med...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest i...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The truth is cruel, but it can be loved and it makes free those who love it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minute...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Repetition is the only form of permanence that nature can achieve.
GEORGE SANTAYANA People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious that that they are true.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Life is not a spectacle or a feast: it is a predicament.
GEORGE SANTAYANA If one is the master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has at the same time insight i...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.
GEORGE SANTAYANA America is a young country with an old mentality.
GEORGE SANTAYANA A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
GEORGE SANTAYANA A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judg...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Our character...is an omen of our destiny, and the more integrity we have and keep, the simpler and ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentabl...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Life is not a spectacle or feast; it is a predicament.
GEORGE SANTAYANA For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there rem...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
GEORGE SANTAYANA An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The young man who has not wept is a savage,
and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Why shouldn't things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? They are so, and we are so, and they...
GEORGE SANTAYANA To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blo...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing with...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
GEORGE SANTAYANA To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
GEORGE SANTAYANA A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imagin...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
GEORGE SANTAYANA To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation sho...
GEORGE SANTAYANA It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot thr...
GEORGE SANTAYANA The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous i...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Consciousness is a born hermit.
GEORGE SANTAYANA My atheism, like that of GEORGE SANTAYANA Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it mus...
GEORGE SANTAYANA In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
GEORGE SANTAYANA The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures...
GEORGE SANTAYANA To understand one's self is the classic form of consolation; to delude one's self is the romantic.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.
GEORGE SANTAYANA Nothing you can lose by dying is half as precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of...
GEORGE SANTAYANA Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it
GEORGE SANTAYANA Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of ...
GEORGE SANTAYANA There is no dunce like a mature dunce
GEORGE SANTAYANA