Top 400 George Santayana Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 9

151. “Memory itself is an internal rumour.”

— George Santayana

152. “There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.”

— George Santayana

153. “Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.”

— George Santayana

154. “I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.”

— George Santayana

155. “In the contemplation of beauty we are raised above ourselves, the passions are silenced and we are happy in the recognition of a good that we do not seek to possess.”

— George Santayana

156. “To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

158. “America is a young country with an old mentality.”

— George Santayana

159. “The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.”

— George Santayana

160. “Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is an effort to work further and be efficient beyond the range of one’s powers.”

— George Santayana

161. “The truth properly means the sum of all true propositions, what omniscience would assert, the whole ideal system of qualities andrelations which the world has exemplified or will exemplify. The truth is all things seen under the form of eternity.”

— George Santayana

162. “Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.”

— George Santayana

163. “A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.”

— George Santayana

164. “Nature is like a beautiful woman that may be as delightfully and as truly known at a certain distance as upon a closer view; as to knowing her through and through; that is nonsense in both cases, and might not reward our pains.”

— George Santayana

165. “The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.”

— George Santayana

166. “Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.”

— George Santayana

167. “Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.”

— George Santayana

168. “In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.”

— George Santayana

169. “Most men’s conscience, habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continually comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally suggested them.”

— George Santayana

170. “Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.”

— George Santayana

171. “Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked.”

— George Santayana

172. “Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.”

— George Santayana

173. “Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.”

— George Santayana

174. “Docility is the observable half of reason.”

— George Santayana

175. “The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don’t understand it.”

— George Santayana

176. “Those who cannot remember the pastare condemned to repeat it. or: Those who have never heard of good system development practice are condemned to reinvent it.”

— George Santayana

177. “He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.”

— George Santayana

178. “A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.”

— George Santayana

179. “Fear first created the gods.”

— George Santayana

180. “There is nothing sacred about convention; there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.”

— George Santayana

181. “Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.”

— George Santayana

182. “Those who speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality.”

— George Santayana

183. “The God to whom depth in philosophy bring back men’s minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them.”

— George Santayana

184. “In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else.”

— George Santayana

185. “Consciousness is a born hermit.”

— George Santayana

186. “Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable, precisely, the balance and wisdom that come from long perspectives and broad foundations.”

— George Santayana

187. “An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.”

— George Santayana

188. “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.”

— George Santayana

189. “People who feel themselves to be exiles in this world are mightily inclined to believe themselves citizens of another.”

— George Santayana

190. “What is the part of wisdom? To dream with one eye open; to be detatched from the world without being hostile to it; to welcome fugitive beauties and pity fugitive sufferings, without forgetting for a moment how fugitive they are.”

— George Santayana

191. “Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.”

— George Santayana

192. “The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.”

— George Santayana

193. “It is wisdom to believe the heart.”

— George Santayana

194. “It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation.”

— George Santayana

195. “My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.”

— George Santayana

196. “It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.”

— George Santayana

197. “Truth is a jewel which should not be painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.”

— George Santayana

198. “All spiritual interests are supported by animal life.”

— George Santayana

199. “A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.”

— George Santayana

200. “Sometimes we have to change the truth in order to remember it.”

— George Santayana