George Santayana Men Quotations

Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.

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.

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

Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.

Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.

My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.

Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.

For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.

Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.

Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.

The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.

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

For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.

By nature's kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man's power to answer do not occur to him at all.

All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death.

Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.

The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.

Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.

The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.

A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.

Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.

Man alone knows that he must die; but that very knowledge raises him, in a sense, above mortality, by making him a sharer in the vision of eternal truth. He becomes the spectator of his own tragedy; he sympathizes so much with the fury of the storm that he has no ears left for the shipwrecked sailor, though the sailor were his own soul. The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

Men have always been the victims of trifles, but when they were uncomfortable and passionate, and in constant danger, they hardly had time to notice what the daily texture of their thoughts was in their calm intervals, whereas with us the intervals are all.

The wonder of an artist's performance grows with the range of his penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal isolation, considerate of other men's fate and a great diviner of their secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance than they could have spoken with to themselves.

What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word--the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.

It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior.

Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.

Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.

It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man's wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility

Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.

Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.

Man's most serious activity is play.

To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other's looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.

With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.

When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.

There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive

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

Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he.

An operation that eventually kills may be technically successful, and the man may die cured; and so a description of religion thatshowed it to be madness might first show how real and warm it was, so that if it perished, at least it would perish understood.

Each religion necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself. Religions, like languages, are necessary rivals. What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends.

The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them

Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.

Nothing you can lose by dying is half as precious as the readiness to die, which is man's charter of nobility.

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

A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.

Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home.

Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.

Man is not made to understand life, but to live it.

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 .

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's that 'a little philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion.' At the same time, when Bacon penned that sage epigram... he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.

Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.

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.