Top 400 George Santayana Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I like to walk about amidst the beautiful things that adorn the world.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

209. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

213. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

219. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

229. “We should have to abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms.”

— George Santayana

230. “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

231. “The sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a vehicle for things...”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

239. “It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.”

— George Santayana

240. “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

241. “The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.”

— George Santayana

242. “Art is a delayed echo.”

— George Santayana

243. “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

244. “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

245. “My soul hates the fool whose only passion is to live by rule.”

— George Santayana

246. “Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself.”

— George Santayana

247. “To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.”

— George Santayana

248. “Every real object must cease to be what it seemed, and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

250. “Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center.”

— George Santayana