A biography for George Santayanahasn’t been written yet.
“Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.”
“The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.”
“Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.”
“The earth has its music for those who will listen.”
“Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”
“That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.”
“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.”
“To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.”
“Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.”
“It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.”
“The wisest mind hath something yet to learn.”
“Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.”
“The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.”
“Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.”
“Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.”
“The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.”
“We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”
“The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.”
“Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.”
“I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.”