Top 400 George Santayana Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.”

— George Santayana

252. “Tolerated people are never conciliated. They live on, but the aroma of their life is lost.”

— George Santayana

253. “The pint would call the quart a dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him.”

— George Santayana

254. “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

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

— George Santayana

256. “In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

258. “Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.”

— George Santayana

259. “Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

262. “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

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

— George Santayana

264. “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

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

— George Santayana

266. “The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.”

— George Santayana

267. “Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.”

— George Santayana

268. “When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.”

— George Santayana

269. “The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

271. “Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.”

— George Santayana

272. “What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.”

— George Santayana

273. “Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.”

— George Santayana

274. “When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.”

— George Santayana

275. “Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience – the union of life and peace.”

— George Santayana

276. “Eloquence is a republican art, as conversation is an aristocratic one.”

— George Santayana

277. “Guard you thoughts as you would your wallet. Habit is stronger than reason.”

— George Santayana

278. “Nothing you can lose by dying is half as precious as the readiness to die, which is man’s charter of nobility.”

— George Santayana

279. “The profoundest affinities are the most readily felt; they remain a background and standard for all happiness and if we trace them out we succeed.”

— George Santayana

280. “To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.”

— George Santayana

281. “The human mind is not rich enough to drive many horses abreast and wants one general scheme, under which it strives to bring everything.”

— George Santayana

282. “To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and aesthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so.”

— George Santayana

283. “The spirit’s foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.”

— George Santayana

284. “The humanitarian, like the missionary, is often an irreducible enemy of the people he seeks to befriend, because he has not imagination enough to sympathize with their proper needs nor humility enough to respect them as if they were his own. Arrogance, fanaticism, meddlesomeness, and imperialism may then masquerade as philanthropy.”

— George Santayana

285. “All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.”

— George Santayana

286. “Nothing can so pierce the soul as the uttermost sigh of the body.”

— George Santayana

287. “The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms.”

— George Santayana

288. “Though the heart wear the garment of its sorrow And be not happy like a naked star, Yet from the thought of peace some peace we borrow, Some rapture from the rapture felt afar.”

— George Santayana

289. “Religion is the natural reaction of the imagination when confronted by the difficulties in a truculent world.”

— George Santayana

290. “The working of great institutions is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought.”

— George Santayana

291. “Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.”

— George Santayana

292. “To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful.”

— George Santayana

293. “There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.”

— George Santayana

294. “A fanatical imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel.”

— George Santayana

295. “For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.”

— George Santayana

296. “That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.”

— George Santayana

297. “The living have never shown me how to live.”

— George Santayana

298. “Philosophers are as jealous as woman; each wants a monopoly of praise.”

— George Santayana

299. “The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.”

— George Santayana

300. “Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.”

— George Santayana