George Santayana Quotes

By nature's kindly disposition, most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to candor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.

It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the part known gives us evidence enough that the unknown part cannot be much amiss.

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

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

In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.

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.

It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.

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.