574 Quotes by George Santayana

The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence.

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned.

Nothing you can lose by dying is half as precious as the readiness to die, which is man’s charter of nobility.

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panza’s who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixote’s with a sense for ideals, but mad.

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.

To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other’s looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.

One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.

Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one’s powers.

Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age.