George Santayana

Bekannte Zitate von George Santayana

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

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

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.

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

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another people are friends in spots.

Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent it is a salutation, not an embrace.

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.

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

Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.

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

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

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate they are green and vigorous in old age.

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

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

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.

The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.

Knowledge is recognition of something absent it is a salutation, not an embrace.

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

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

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

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.

The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.