The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
George Santayana

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
George Santayana

The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
George Santayana

The family is one of nature's masterpieces.
George Santayana

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
George Santayana

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
George Santayana

The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
George Santayana

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.
George Santayana

The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
George Santayana

The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
George Santayana

The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
George Santayana

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
George Santayana

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
George Santayana

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.
George Santayana

The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
George Santayana

The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
George Santayana

The spirit's foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
George Santayana

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.
George Santayana

The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
George Santayana

The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
George Santayana