George Santayana Love Quotations

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.

Love makes us poets, and the approach of death should makes us philosophers

Love is only half the illusion; the lover, but not his love, is deceived.

To be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually towards another, makes it one of the dearest employments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solicitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty?

Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.

love make us poets, and the approach of death should make us philosophers.

A friend's only gift is himself.

Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.

Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.

...so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to the one being known how to touch it. That being is not selected but recognized and obeyed.

In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of immortality....The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral.