A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
George Santayana

A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
George Santayana

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

A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
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

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

All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
George Santayana

All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
George Santayana

Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
George Santayana

America is a young country with an old mentality.
George Santayana


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

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

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

Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
George Santayana

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

Depression is rage spread thin.
George Santayana

Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
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

Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
George Santayana