Wise men are usually old men .....

George Santayana Quotes
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana

A man's feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world. 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.
George Santayana

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better. George Santayana

All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible. George Santayana

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato. George Santayana

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it. George Santayana

America is a young country with an old mentality. George Santayana

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

Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him. George Santayana

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

By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all. George Santayana

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds. George Santayana

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

Depression is rage spread thin. George Santayana

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. George Santayana

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny. George Santayana

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end. George Santayana

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

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

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit. George Santayana

For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep. George Santayana

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity. George Santayana

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree,it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different. George Santayana

Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy. George Santayana

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

Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better. George Santayana

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

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

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads. George Santayana

I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty. George Santayana

If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved. George Santayana

In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality... The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral. George Santayana

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide. George Santayana


In 1893, Santayana experienced a metanoia, a change of heart. Gradually he altered his style of life from that of an active student turned professor to one focused on the imaginative celebration of life. In doing so, he began planning for his early retirement, finding university life increasingly less conducive to intellectual pursuits and delight in living. Three events preceded his metanoia: the unexpected death of a young student, witnessing his father's death, and the marriage of his sister Susana. Santayana's reflections on these events led to the ancient wisdom that acceptance of the tragic leads to a lyrical release. “Cultivate imagination, love it, give it endless forms, but do not let it deceive you. Enjoy the world, travel over it, and learn its ways, but do not let it hold you … . To possess things and persons in idea is the only pure good to be got out of them; to possess them physically or legally is a burden and a snare (Persons and Places, 427-28).”