George Santayana Mean Quotations

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.

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal.

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.

Order, for a liberal, means only peace; and the hope of a profound peace was one of the chief motives in the liberal movement. Concessions and tolerance and equality would thus have really led to peace, and to peace of the most radical kind, the peace of moral extinction.

Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

The truth properly means the sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities andrelations which the world has exemplified or will exemplify. The truth is all things seen under the form of eternity.

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

Logic, like language, is partly a free construction and partly a means of symbolizing and harnessing in expression the existing diversities of things; and whilst some languages, given a man's constitution and habits, may seem more beautiful and convenient to him than others, it is a foolish heat in a patriot to insist that only his native language is intelligible or right.