Top 400 George Santayana Quotes (2024 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. “Religions are the great fairy tales of conscience.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

112. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

116. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

127. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

133. “Beauty is objectified pleasure.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

137. “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

138. “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

139. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

143. “Columbus gave the world another world.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

145. “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

146. “It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

149. “I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana