George Santayana Quotes

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

My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

Oaths are the fossils of piety.

Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.

The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.

The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.

Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.