George Santayana Quotes

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 work desperately for a moment at no matter what.

4445

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.

2999

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

1074

The worship of power is an old religion.

3331

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy

3683

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.

3907

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.

3152

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

3462

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

3495

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

3162

The earth has music for those who listen.

2901

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

3351

The man who is not permitted to own is owned.

1165

Depression is rage spread thin.

1336

The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.

4372