Skip to content

Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.

— George Santayana Persons and Places (1944)

Another quote →

Topics

More quotes by George Santayana

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

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

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

Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies (1922)

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

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

To covet truth is a very distinguished passion.

The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy (1911)

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

The Sense of Beauty (1896)

All George Santayana quotes →

You may also like

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

From now on, everything in life will appear blurry to me. What’s the point of wiping my glasses when my vision has already left me?"

Sanu Sharma

The land of easy mathematics where he who works adds up and he who retires subtracts.

Núria Añó

Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: George Santayana (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.