George Santayana Mind Quotations

The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.

The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.

To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.

Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

There must ... be in our very nature a very radical and widespread tendency to observe beauty, and to value it. No account of the principles of the mind can be at all adequate that passes over so conspicuous a faculty.

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.

The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.

Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.

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

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.

A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind, if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak,by the mind's inertia and conceptions of things by its activity. Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths.

Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act wisely.