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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

George Santayana Quotes

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

– 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

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

– George Santayana

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

– George Santayana

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

– George Santayana

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

– George Santayana

A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.

– George Santayana

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

– George Santayana

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

– George Santayana

Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

– George Santayana

We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.

– George Santayana

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.

– George Santayana

The degree in which a poet’s imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

– George Santayana

Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

– George Santayana

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

– George Santayana

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

– George Santayana

Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.

– George Santayana

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

– George Santayana

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.

– George Santayana

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

– George Santayana

A man’s feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.

– George Santayana

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

– George Santayana

A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.

– George Santayana

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

– George Santayana

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

– George Santayana

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

– George Santayana

Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.

– George Santayana

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.

– 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

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

– George Santayana

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