Quotes by George Santayana

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
(Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 3)

Music is essentially useless, as life is.
(Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 4)

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.
(Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 4)

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
(Life of Reason (1905) vol. 4, ch. 8)

The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
(Little Essays (1920) "Ideal Immortality")

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
(Soliloquies in England, 1922, "War Shrines")

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.
(The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905)

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
(The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905)

For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned.
(Winds of Doctrine (1913) ch. 2)

Intolerance itself is a form of egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it.
(Winds of Doctrine (1913) ch. 4)