Top 400 George Santayana Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Trust the man who hesitates in his speech and is quick and steady in action, but beware of long arguments and long beards.”

— George Santayana

102. “Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.”

— George Santayana

103. “American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism.”

— George Santayana

104. “Columbus found a world, and had no chart save one that Faith deciphered in the skies.”

— George Santayana

105. “Music is essentially useless, as life is; but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.”

— George Santayana

106. “Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.”

— George Santayana

107. “Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.”

— George Santayana

108. “Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable; what it is or what it means can never be said.”

— George Santayana

109. “That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.”

— George Santayana

110. “Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.”

— George Santayana

111. “The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.”

— George Santayana

112. “Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.”

— George Santayana

113. “Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.”

— George Santayana

114. “It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on first, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the parts known give us evidence enough that the unknown parts cannot be much amiss.”

— George Santayana

115. “Perhaps the only true dignity of man is his capacity to despise himself.”

— George Santayana

116. “What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.”

— George Santayana

117. “People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are precious than that they are true.”

— George Santayana

118. “A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.”

— George Santayana

119. “To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.”

— George Santayana

120. “To understand oneself is the classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic.”

— George Santayana

121. “To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.”

— George Santayana

122. “Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it...”

— George Santayana

123. “The highest form of vanity is love of fame.”

— George Santayana

124. “In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.”

— George Santayana

125. “Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.”

— George Santayana

126. “The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.”

— George Santayana

127. “Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.”

— George Santayana

128. “Whoever it was who searched the heavens with a telescope and found no God would not have found the human mind if he had searched the brain with a microscope.”

— George Santayana

129. “It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.”

— George Santayana

130. “The Soul is the voice of the body’s interests.”

— George Santayana

131. “Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.”

— George Santayana

132. “Beauty is objectified pleasure.”

— George Santayana

133. “Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.”

— George Santayana

134. “Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.”

— George Santayana

135. “The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.”

— George Santayana

136. “Work and love these are the basics; waking life is a dream controlled.”

— George Santayana

137. “Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird’s chirp.”

— George Santayana

138. “Our dignity is not in what we do, but what we understand.”

— George Santayana

139. “Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They may all collapse altogether.”

— George Santayana

140. “The aim of education is the condition of suspended judgment on everything.”

— George Santayana

141. “Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated.”

— George Santayana

142. “History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory.”

— George Santayana

143. “A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.”

— George Santayana

144. “Columbus gave the world another world.”

— George Santayana

145. “America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.”

— George Santayana

146. “To be happy you must have taken the measure of your powers, tasted the fruits of your passion, and learned your place in the world.”

— George Santayana

147. “The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.”

— George Santayana

148. “Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.”

— George Santayana

149. “Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs.”

— George Santayana

150. “Memory itself is an internal rumour.”

— George Santayana