Top 400 George Santayana Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

205. “Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

207. “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

208. “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

209. “With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child’s eyes.”

— George Santayana

210. “The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.”

— George Santayana

211. “The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.”

— George Santayana

212. “The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.”

— George Santayana

213. “It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.”

— George Santayana

214. “Love, whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and prompts a man to give his life for his friends.”

— George Santayana

215. “Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

218. “Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.”

— George Santayana

219. “Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.”

— George Santayana

220. “The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.”

— George Santayana

221. “Miracles are propitious accidents, the natural causes of which are too complicated to be readily understood.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

223. “Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.”

— George Santayana

224. “The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.”

— George Santayana

225. “For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned.”

— George Santayana

226. “As widowers proverbially marry again, so a man with the habit of friendship always finds new friends.”

— George Santayana

227. “To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.”

— George Santayana

228. “You and I possess manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams.”

— George Santayana

229. “There is nothing impossible in the existence of the supernatural: its existence seems to me decidedly probable.”

— George Santayana

230. “Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.”

— George Santayana

231. “Art is a delayed echo.”

— George Santayana

232. “Man’s most serious activity is play.”

— George Santayana

233. “There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.”

— George Santayana

234. “I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.”

— George Santayana

235. “The Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single line to stand perfect and unmarred.”

— George Santayana

236. “There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.”

— George Santayana

237. “Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.”

— George Santayana

238. “There are three traps that strangle philosophy: The church, the marriage bed, and the professor’s chair.”

— George Santayana

239. “A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.”

— George Santayana

240. “To drink in the spirit of a place you should be not only alone but unhurried.”

— George Santayana

241. “The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.”

— George Santayana

242. “It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.”

— George Santayana

243. “Our occasional madness is less wonderful than our occasional sanity.”

— George Santayana

244. “Better not be a hero than work oneself up into heroism by shouting lies.”

— George Santayana

245. “Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything.”

— George Santayana

246. “In this world we must either institute conventional forms of expression or else pretend that we have nothing to express; the choice lies between a mask and a figleaf.”

— George Santayana

247. “Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.”

— George Santayana

248. “To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.”

— George Santayana

249. “The fly that prefers sweetness to a long life may drown in honey.”

— George Santayana

250. “Religion is the love of life in the consciousness of impotence.”

— George Santayana