574 Quotes by George Santayana

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.

Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.

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

To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.