Top 400 George Santayana Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer.”

— George Santayana

52. “Chaos is a name for any order that produces confusion in our minds.”

— George Santayana

53. “The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panza’s who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixote’s with a sense for ideals, but mad.”

— George Santayana

54. “An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.”

— George Santayana

55. “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.”

— George Santayana

56. “Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.”

— George Santayana

57. “There is no dunce like a mature dunce.”

— George Santayana

58. “There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.”

— George Santayana

59. “To fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because they dislike each other’s looks, or because they have met walking in opposite directions.”

— George Santayana

60. “Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine That lights the pathway but one step ahead Across a void of mystery and dread.”

— George Santayana

61. “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

62. “One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.”

— George Santayana

63. “Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of others.”

— George Santayana

64. “The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.”

— George Santayana

65. “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.”

— George Santayana

66. “Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.”

— George Santayana

67. “Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.”

— George Santayana

68. “In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.”

— George Santayana

69. “Oaths are the fossils of piety.”

— George Santayana

70. “The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive.”

— George Santayana

71. “Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.”

— George Santayana

72. “It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.”

— George Santayana

73. “Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.”

— George Santayana

74. “One real world is enough.”

— George Santayana

75. “There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.”

— George Santayana

76. “Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.”

— George Santayana

77. “Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.”

— George Santayana

78. “Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.”

— George Santayana

79. “The same battle in the clouds will be known to the deaf only as lightning and to the blind only as thunder.”

— George Santayana

80. “Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.”

— George Santayana

81. “For Shakespeare, in the matter of religion, the choice lay between Christianity and nothing. He chose nothing.”

— George Santayana

82. “The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.”

— George Santayana

83. “I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free, from world to world, from all worlds carried me.”

— George Santayana

84. “The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man’s good is found in another’s evil.”

— George Santayana

85. “To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.”

— George Santayana

86. “Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act wisely.”

— George Santayana

87. “The unforgivable sin is the refusal to pardon.”

— George Santayana

88. “To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.”

— George Santayana

89. “The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger.”

— George Santayana

90. “Spirituality lies in regarding existence merely as a vehicle for contemplation, and contemplation merely a vehicle for joy.”

— George Santayana

91. “Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.”

— George Santayana

92. “It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man’s wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility.”

— George Santayana

93. “Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.”

— George Santayana

94. “Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home.”

— George Santayana

95. “Beware of long arguments and long beards.”

— George Santayana

96. “The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be assumed in order to support knowledge is impossible to draw. Memory itself is an internal rumour.”

— George Santayana

97. “Existence is a miracle, and, morally considered, a free gift from moment to moment.”

— George Santayana

98. “If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.”

— George Santayana

99. “The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.”

— George Santayana

100. “Society is like the air, necessary to breathe but insufficient to live on.”

— George Santayana