Quotes by George Santayana

“We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to...”

“Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.”

“To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.”

“Consciousness is a born hermit.”

“The earth has its music for those who will listen.”

“A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of ones life, or of human life, as it truly has b...”

“The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its to...”

“love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.”

“Music is essentially useless, as life is.”

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

“The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.”

“The worship of power is an old religion.”

“With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and ba...”

“The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,She makes a sweeter music than is heard.”

“That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.”

“Depression is rage spread thin.”

“The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.”

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

“The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.”

“There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.”