Frases de George Santayana

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“Aquellos que no pueden recordar el pasado están condenados a repetirlo.”

“La vida no se ha hecho para comprenderla, sino para vivirla.”

“Los amigos son esa parte de la raza humana con la que uno puede ser humano.”

“Nuestra adhesión a un jefe natural no es una pérdida de libertad, es el reconocimiento de que nuestras ideas tiene un ejecutor y un intérprete.”

“El fanatismo consiste en redoblar el esfuerzo cuando has olvidado el fin.”

“Para una idea es de muy mal agüero estar de moda, pues esto implica que más adelante estará anticuada para siempre.”

“La memoria…… es un rumor interno”

“La teoría nos ayuda a mantener nuestra ignorancia de los hechos.”

“La música es esencialmente inútil, como la vida.”

“La belleza es una garantía de la posible conformidad entre el alma y la naturaleza, y por lo tanto una razón de la fe en la supremacía del bien.”

“[El empirista] piensa que cree sólo en lo que ve, pero es mucho mejor creyendo que viendo.”

“Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.”

“The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.”

“It is not politics that can bring true liberty to the soul; that must be achieved, if at all, by philosophy;”

“Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its Christianity, in practice, must be largely converted to paganism.”

“"There is no God, and Mary is his mother." Often, almost certainly incorrectly, attributed to Santayana himself. More plausibly attributed to Robert Lowell, as a sardonic description of Santayana's philosophy.”

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

“[Everything] ideal has a natural basis and everything natural an ideal development.”

“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.”

“Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.”

“In the Gospels, for instance, we sometimes find the kingdom of heaven illustrated by principles drawn from observation of this world rather than from an ideal conception of justice; … They remind us that the God we are seeking is present and active, that he is the living God; they are doubtless necessary if we are to keep religion from passing into a mere idealism and God into the vanishing point of our thought and endeavour.”

“Liberal philosophy, at this point, ceases to be empirical and British in order to become German and transcendental. Moral life, it now believes, is not the pursuit of liberty and happiness of all sorts by all sorts of different creatures; it is the development of a single spirit in all life through a series of necessary phases, each higher than the preceding one. No man, accordingly, can really or ultimately desire anything but what the best people desire. This is the principle of the higher snobbery; and in fact, all earnest liberals are higher snobs.”

“When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind…They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph for their country.”

“… I once shook hands with Longfellow at a garden party in 1881; and I often saw Dr. Holmes, who was our neighbor in Beacon Street: but Emerson I never saw.”

“It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.”

“At midday the daily food of all Spaniards was the puchero or cocido, as the dish is really called which the foreigners call pot-pourri or olla podrida.”

“I was still “at the church door.””

“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

“One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”