The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
Meaning of the quote
The quote means that even the most intelligent and knowledgeable people still have more to discover and learn. No one knows everything, and there is always room for growth and improvement, no matter how smart or experienced they may be.
About George Santayana
George Santayana was a fascinating figure – a Spanish-American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist who lived a life straddling two cultures. Born in Spain but raised and educated in the US, he eventually left his academic post at Harvard to return to Europe, where he was buried in the Spanish Pantheon in Rome. Santayana was known for his insightful aphorisms and his nuanced perspective on religion and culture.
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More quotes from George Santayana
The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
Spanish-American philosopher
The Soul is the voice of the body’s interests.
Spanish-American philosopher
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
Spanish-American philosopher
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
Spanish-American philosopher
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
Spanish-American philosopher
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.
Spanish-American philosopher
The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
Spanish-American philosopher
Music is essentially useless, as is life.
Spanish-American philosopher
It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
Spanish-American philosopher
Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.
Spanish-American philosopher
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
Spanish-American philosopher
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.
Spanish-American philosopher
The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don’t understand it.
Spanish-American philosopher
America is a young country with an old mentality.
Spanish-American philosopher
Depression is rage spread thin.
Spanish-American philosopher
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
Spanish-American philosopher
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.
Spanish-American philosopher
Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
Spanish-American philosopher
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
Spanish-American philosopher
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.
Spanish-American philosopher
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
Spanish-American philosopher
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.
Spanish-American philosopher
Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.
Spanish-American philosopher
A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
Spanish-American philosopher
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
Spanish-American philosopher
To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
Spanish-American philosopher
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
Spanish-American philosopher
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Spanish-American philosopher
A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
Spanish-American philosopher
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
Spanish-American philosopher
By nature’s kindly disposition most questions which it is beyond a man’s power to answer do not occur to him at all.
Spanish-American philosopher
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.
Spanish-American philosopher
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
Spanish-American philosopher
The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of what it is pretending to be.
Spanish-American philosopher
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.
Spanish-American philosopher
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.
Spanish-American philosopher
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.
Spanish-American philosopher
Sanity is madness put to good use.
Spanish-American philosopher
Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.
Spanish-American philosopher
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
Spanish-American philosopher
For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.
Spanish-American philosopher
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
Spanish-American philosopher
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
Spanish-American philosopher
Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.
Spanish-American philosopher
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
Spanish-American philosopher
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
Spanish-American philosopher
Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.
Spanish-American philosopher
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.
Spanish-American philosopher
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
Spanish-American philosopher
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
Spanish-American philosopher
It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.
Spanish-American philosopher
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
Spanish-American philosopher
Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.
Spanish-American philosopher
Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
Spanish-American philosopher
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
Spanish-American philosopher
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
Spanish-American philosopher
Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
Spanish-American philosopher
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
Spanish-American philosopher
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
Spanish-American philosopher
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.
Spanish-American philosopher
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
Spanish-American philosopher
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
Spanish-American philosopher
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
Spanish-American philosopher
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
Spanish-American philosopher
Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.
Spanish-American philosopher
The degree in which a poet’s imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
Spanish-American philosopher
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.
Spanish-American philosopher
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
Spanish-American philosopher
If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
Spanish-American philosopher
Habit is stronger than reason.
Spanish-American philosopher
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
Spanish-American philosopher
I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
Spanish-American philosopher
Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.
Spanish-American philosopher
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
Spanish-American philosopher
The spirit’s foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
Spanish-American philosopher
One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.
Spanish-American philosopher
The family is one of nature’s masterpieces.
Spanish-American philosopher
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
Spanish-American philosopher
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
Spanish-American philosopher
Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.
Spanish-American philosopher
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.
Spanish-American philosopher
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
Spanish-American philosopher
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
Spanish-American philosopher
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.
Spanish-American philosopher
All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
Spanish-American philosopher
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.
Spanish-American philosopher
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.
Spanish-American philosopher
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
Spanish-American philosopher
The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.
Spanish-American philosopher
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
Spanish-American philosopher
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.
Spanish-American philosopher
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
Spanish-American philosopher
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
Spanish-American philosopher
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
Spanish-American philosopher
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
Spanish-American philosopher
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
Spanish-American philosopher
Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
Spanish-American philosopher
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.
Spanish-American philosopher
In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
Spanish-American philosopher
Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.
Spanish-American philosopher
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.
Spanish-American philosopher
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.
Spanish-American philosopher
It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.
Spanish-American philosopher
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.
Spanish-American philosopher
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.
Spanish-American philosopher
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
Spanish-American philosopher
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
Spanish-American philosopher
A man’s feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.
Spanish-American philosopher
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
Spanish-American philosopher
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.
Spanish-American philosopher
Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.
Spanish-American philosopher
The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.
Spanish-American philosopher
The Bible is literature, not dogma.
Spanish-American philosopher
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
Spanish-American philosopher
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.
Spanish-American philosopher
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.
Spanish-American philosopher
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.
Spanish-American philosopher
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
Spanish-American philosopher