George Santayana Quotes About Past

We have collected for you the TOP of George Santayana's best quotes about Past! Here are collected all the quotes about Past starting from the birthday of the Philosopher – December 16, 1863! We hope you will be inspired to new achievements with our constantly updated collection of quotes. At the moment, this page contains 471 sayings of George Santayana about Past. We will be happy if you share our collection of quotes with your friends on social networks!
  • Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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

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

    Past  
    "The Letters of George Santayana".
  • 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 (2013). “Scepticism and Animal Faith”, p.268, Courier Corporation
  • A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.

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

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

    The Life of Reason vol. 1, ch. 12 (1905)
  • 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 (2011). “The Life of Reason: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense”, p.172, MIT 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.

    Past  
  • 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.

    Past  
    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
  • 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.

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

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