Top 400 George Santayana Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Guard you thoughts as you would your wallet. Habit is stronger than reason.”

— George Santayana

252. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

256. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

259. “Reason in my philosophy is only a harmony among irrational impulses.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

261. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

265. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

270. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

273. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

277. “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

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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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289. “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

290. “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

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

— George Santayana

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

298. “Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana