The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
George Santayana

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana

Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
George Santayana

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
George Santayana

To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
George Santayana

Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.
George Santayana

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
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.
George Santayana

Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
George Santayana

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
George Santayana

It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.
George Santayana

Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
George Santayana

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
George Santayana

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
George Santayana

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
George Santayana

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
George Santayana

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
George Santayana

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.
George Santayana

Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
George Santayana

Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
George Santayana

There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
George Santayana

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

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
George Santayana

Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
George Santayana

The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
George Santayana

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
George Santayana

Biography
Nationality: Spanish
Type: Philosopher
Born: December 16, 1863
Died: September 26, 1952