Top 400 George Santayana Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

— George Santayana

Featured in: Short Quotes, Meaningful Quotes, Smart Quotes, Past Quotes, History Quotes

2. “The earth has music for those who listen.”

— George Santayana

Featured in: Nature Quotes

3. “The wisest mind has something yet to learn.”

— George Santayana

Featured in: Lifelong Learning Quotes

4. “The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.”

— George Santayana

5. “A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.”

— George Santayana

6. “Depression is rage spread thin.”

— George Santayana

Featured in: Depression Quotes

7. “Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.”

— George Santayana

Featured in: Individuality Quotes, Design Quotes

8. “A simple life is its own reward.”

— George Santayana

9. “Repetition is the only form of permanence that Nature can achieve.”

— George Santayana

10. “The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.”

— George Santayana

11. “Man is not made to understand life, but to live it.”

— George Santayana

12. “People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.”

— George Santayana

13. “Familiarity breeds contempt only when it breeds inattention.”

— George Santayana

14. “Wisdom comes from disillusionment.”

— George Santayana

15. “Habit is stronger than reason.”

— George Santayana

16. “There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”

— George Santayana

17. “A country without a memory is a country of madmen.”

— George Santayana

Featured in: Country Quotes

18. “An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.”

— George Santayana

Featured in: Design Quotes

19. “The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.”

— George Santayana

20. “A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.”

— George Santayana

21. “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.”

— George Santayana

22. “Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

24. “Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”

— George Santayana

25. “Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.”

— George Santayana

26. “Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.”

— George Santayana

27. “A man’s feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.”

— George Santayana

Featured in: Country Quotes

28. “If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.”

— George Santayana

29. “Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.”

— George Santayana

30. “Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.”

— George Santayana

31. “The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.”

— George Santayana

32. “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

33. “Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.”

— George Santayana

34. “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

35. “Nietzsche was personally more philosophical than his philosophy. His talk about power, harshness, and superb immorality was the hobby of a harmless young scholar and constitutional invalid.”

— George Santayana

36. “Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.”

— George Santayana

37. “The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.”

— George Santayana

38. “Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.”

— George Santayana

39. “For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.”

— George Santayana

40. “Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.”

— George Santayana

41. “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

42. “Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm’s length.”

— George Santayana

43. “Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect.”

— George Santayana

44. “Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.”

— George Santayana

45. “I have no axe to grind; only my thoughts to burnish.”

— George Santayana

46. “History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.”

— George Santayana

47. “The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.”

— George Santayana

48. “The body is an instrument, the mind its function, the witness and reward of its operation.”

— George Santayana

49. “Sanity is madness put to good use.”

— George Santayana

50. “Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.”

— George Santayana