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.

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

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

The worship of power is an old religion.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

The earth has music for those who listen.

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

The man who is not permitted to own is owned.

Depression is rage spread thin.

The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.