Top 400 George Santayana Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

154. “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

155. “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

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

— George Santayana

157. “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

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

— George Santayana

159. “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

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

— George Santayana

161. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

164. “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

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

— George Santayana

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “Consciousness is a born hermit.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

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

— George Santayana

175. “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

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

— George Santayana

177. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

180. “Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

182. “Fear first created the gods.”

— George Santayana

183. “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

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

— George Santayana

185. “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

186. “Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.”

— George Santayana

187. “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

188. “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

189. “The mediocrity of everything in the great world of today is simply appalling. We live in intellectual slums.”

— George Santayana

190. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

193. “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

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

— George Santayana

195. “I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.”

— George Santayana

196. “To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.”

— George Santayana

197. “Heaven is to be at peace with things.”

— George Santayana

198. “What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word – the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.”

— George Santayana

199. “The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.”

— George Santayana

200. “If artists and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.”

— George Santayana