574 Quotes by George Santayana

The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.

A man’s memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

A friend’s only gift is himself.

There was a distinct class of these gentlemen tramps, young men no longer young, who wouldn’t settle down, who disliked polite society and the genteel conventions, but hadn’t enough intelligence or enough conceit to think themselves transcendentalists or poets, in the style of Thoreau or of Walt Whitman.

The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend, because he has not imagination enough to sympathize with their proper needs nor humility enough to respect them as if they were his own. Arrogance, fanaticism, meddlesomeness, and imperialism may then masquerade as philanthropy.

When we feel the poetic thrill, is it not that we find sweep in the concise and depth in the clear, as we might find all the lights of the sea in the water of a jewel? And what is a philosophic thought but such an epitome?

There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor’s chair.

Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience – the union of life and peace.

O WORLD, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise,. And on the inward vision close the eyes,. But it is wisdom to believe the heart.