A biography for George Santayanahasn’t been written yet.
“The family is one of nature's masterpieces.”
“Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.”
“Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.”
“To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.”
“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.”
“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.”
“History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.”
“Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.”
“Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.”
“Depression is rage spread thin.”
“Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.”
“The worship of power is an old religion.”
“Music is essentially useless, as life is.”
“To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.”
“All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.”
“The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.”
“A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”
“The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.”
“It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”
“Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.”