A biography for George Santayanahasn’t been written yet.
“Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.”
“Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.”
“Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.”
“Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.”
“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
“A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.”
“Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.”
“Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.”
“The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.”
“Habit is stronger than reason.”
“The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.”
“Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.”
“To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.”
“Oaths are the fossils of piety.”
“Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.”
“Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.”
“The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.”
“The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.”
“The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.”
“The highest form of vanity is love of fame.”