George Santayana Quotes About Past

Quotes about: Past

• Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

  George Santayana

  Past, Infancy Is, History

  "The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress", Vol. I, Reason in Common Sense by George Santayana, 1905-1906.

• We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.

  George Santayana

  Future, Past, Welcome

• 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.

  George Santayana

  Change, Children, Persistence

  George Santayana (2011). “The Life of Reason: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense”, p.172, MIT Press

• A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

  George Santayana

  Change, Art, Memories

  George Santayana (1986). “The Works of George Santayana”

• Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

  George Santayana

  Change, Wisdom, Memories

  The Life of Reason vol. 1, ch. 12 (1905)

• Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.

  George Santayana

  Memories, Past, Echoes

  George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.375, 谷月社

• Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.

  George Santayana

  Character, Past, Order

  George Santayana (2015). “The Life of Reason: Human Understanding”, p.380, 谷月社

• My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

  George Santayana

  Character, Past, Historical Novels

  George Santayana, Martin A. Coleman (2009). “The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings”, p.62, Indiana University Press

• Those who cannot remember the pastare condemned to repeat it. or: Those who have never heard of good system development practice are condemned to reinvent it.

  George Santayana

  Past, Practice, Development

• There is (as I now find) no remorse for time long past, even for what may have mortified us or made us ashamed of ourselves when it was happening: there is a pleasant panoramic sense of what it all was and how it all had to be. Why, if we are not vain or snobbish, need we desire that it should have been different? The better things we missed may yet be enjoyed or attained by someone else somewhere: why isn't that just as good? And there is no regret, either, in the sense of wishing the past to return, or missing it: it is quite real enough as it is, there at its own date and place.

  George Santayana

  Regret, Real, Past

  "The Letters of George Santayana".

• It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.

  George Santayana

  Beauty, Past, Comfort

  George Santayana, Marianne S. Wokeck, Martin A. Coleman, James Gouinlock (2015). “The Life of Reason Or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Art, Volume VII, Book Four”, p.118, MIT Press

• Truth is one of the realities covered in the eclectic religion of our fathers by the idea of God. Awe very properly hangs about it, since it is the immovable standard and silent witness of all our memories and assertions; and the past and the future, which in our anxious life are so differently interesting and so differently dark, are one seamless garment for the truth, shining like the sun.

  George Santayana

  Truth, Memories, Father

  George Santayana (2013). “Scepticism and Animal Faith”, p.268, Courier Corporation

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