Top 400 George Santayana Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— George Santayana

207. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

214. “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

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

— George Santayana

216. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

232. “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

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

— George Santayana

234. “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

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

— George Santayana

236. “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

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

— George Santayana

238. “The theatre, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history, because the medium has a kindred movement to that of real life, though an artificial setting and form.”

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

242. “Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.”

— George Santayana

243. “Art is a delayed echo.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

246. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— 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