George Santayana Quotes

There is no realism without an element of idealism.

Realism has always been called cynicism.

So, as one sees, I by no means deprive my world of stubborn reality, if I merely call it a world of ideas.

Stripping away artifice - it's the constant standard I aim for in acting, to approximate life. People talk about being bigger than life - but there's nothing bigger than life.

It is a mania shared by philosophers of all ages to deny what exists and to explain what does not exist.

First, philosophy concerns itself with all kinds of issues that don't get much airtime in day-to-day life. What's the nature of reality? Can we ever truly know anything, and if so, how? What does it mean to be a moral agent? And while we're at it, is there any such thing as agency anyway?

Since Plato, we have been considering the nature of knowledge, the meaning of meaning and the status of the physical world.

It has generally been assumed that of two opposing systems of philosophy, e.g., realism and idealism, one only can be true and one must be false; and so philosophers have been hopelessly divided on the question, which is the true one.

I always start with the assumption that everything that happens in the world is actually in the world. It sounds like an obvious thing to say, but it's a very powerful methodological premise.

Realism is punishing. Probabilistic skepticism is worse.

Idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.

Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.

To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man.

The only roads of enquiry there are to think of: one, that it is and that it is not possible for it not to be, this is the path of persuasion (for truth is its companion); the other, that it is not and that it must not be - this I say to you is a path wholly unknowable.

There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis - about the meaning of what we say - and there is all of this ... all of life.

To be is to be perceived

All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end.

Scepticismcan never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill.

Teachings that defy reason defy reality; what defies reality defies life. Defying life is embracing death.

Philosophy is the opposite of fairy tales

The more a man dreams, the less he believes.

Thinking does not lead to truth; truth is the beginning of thought.

You can't write nothing that ain't real.

Progress, then, is a property of the evolution of life as a whole by almost any conceivable intuitive standard.... let us not pretend to deny in our philosophy what we know in our hearts to be true.

Reality the iconoclast once more. Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.