The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
George Santayana

The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
George Santayana

The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
George Santayana

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.
George Santayana

There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
George Santayana

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
George Santayana

Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
George Santayana

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
George Santayana

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
George Santayana

To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
George Santayana

To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
George Santayana

To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
George Santayana

Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
George Santayana

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.
George Santayana

Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
George Santayana

When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
George Santayana

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
George Santayana