The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests ~ George Santayana 

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there. . . . History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten ~ George Santayana 

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be. ~ George Santayana 

Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject. ~ George Santayana 

There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor. ~ George Santayana 

We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what. ~ George Santayana 

The muffled syllables that Nature speaks Fill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks, She makes a sweeter music than is heard. ~ George Santayana 

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better. ~ 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. ~ George Santayana 

Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said. ~ George Santayana