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Quotes from The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress — George Santayana

1863–1952 Spain

← All quotes by George Santayana

22 quotes

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

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

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

It is not society's fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

Every moment celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

Art like life should be free, since both are experimental.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a passion.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble, it must remain rare, if common, it must become mean.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

To know how just a cause we have for grieving is already a consolation.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

The mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a truth, however unwelcome to the flesh, or discover an actual force, however unfavourable to given interests.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

Most men's conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

In proportion as a man's interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates and expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach the same impersonal level of ideas.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.

The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress (1905)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: George Santayana (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.