Top 400 George Santayana Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

257. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

269. “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

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

— George Santayana

271. “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

272. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

275. “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

276. “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

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

— George Santayana

278. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

282. “Many possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many exertions.”

— George Santayana

283. “Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.”

— George Santayana

284. “It is true that I am carrying out various methods of treatment recommended by doctors and dentists in the hope of dying in the remote future in perfect health.”

— George Santayana

285. “We do right enough darling, if we go wrong together.”

— George Santayana

286. “When we feel the poetic thrill, is it not that we find sweep in the concise and depth in the clear, as we might find all the lights of the sea in the water of a jewel? And what is a philosophic thought but such an epitome?”

— George Santayana

287. “Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or idea, but is really some stronger material source.”

— George Santayana

288. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

297. “Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.”

— George Santayana

298. “Each religion necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself. Religions, like languages, are necessary rivals. What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.”

— George Santayana

299. “Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.”

— George Santayana

300. “We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.”

— George Santayana