Top 400 George Santayana Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

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

— George Santayana

308. “Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

310. “There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he.”

— George Santayana

311. “Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

314. “Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.”

— George Santayana

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

— George Santayana

316. “O WORLD, thou choosest not the better part! It is not wisdom to be only wise,. And on the inward vision close the eyes,. But it is wisdom to believe the heart.”

— George Santayana

317. “Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.”

— George Santayana

318. “The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.”

— George Santayana

319. “If clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary matters.”

— George Santayana

320. “Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom – picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode – may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair.”

— George Santayana

321. “The works of nature first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke.”

— George Santayana

322. “A musical education is necessary for musical judgement. What most people relish is hardly music; it is rather a drowsy reverie relieved by nervous thrills.”

— George Santayana

323. “The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.”

— George Santayana

324. “The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.”

— George Santayana

325. “Music is essentially useless, as is life.”

— George Santayana

326. “Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them.”

— George Santayana

327. “Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.”

— George Santayana

328. “Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.”

— George Santayana

329. “If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.”

— George Santayana

330. “There is no right government except good government.”

— George Santayana

331. “What renders man an imaginative and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which could not have existed in solitude : the aims of friendship, religion, science, and art .”

— George Santayana

332. “Animals are born and bred in litters. Solitude grows blessed and peaceful only in old age.”

— George Santayana

333. “Profound skepticism is favorable to conventions, because it doubts that the criticism of conventions is any truer than they are.”

— George Santayana

334. “The world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes.”

— George Santayana

335. “The worship of power is an old religion.”

— George Santayana

336. “A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.”

— George Santayana

337. “I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.”

— George Santayana

338. “To condemn spontaneous and delightful occupations because they are useless for self-preservation shows an uncritical prizing of life irrespective of its content.”

— George Santayana

339. “The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt.”

— George Santayana

340. “Wisdom lies in voluntary finitude and a timely change of heart: until maturity, multiplying the inclusions, up to the limit of natural faculty and moral harmony; afterwards, gladly relinquishing zone after zone of vegetation, and letting the snow-peak of integrity rise to what height it may.”

— George Santayana

341. “It is not society’s fault that most men seem to miss their vocation. Most men have no vocation.”

— George Santayana

342. “Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities.”

— George Santayana

343. “At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself, or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat.”

— George Santayana

344. “The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.”

— George Santayana

345. “It is one thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagination.”

— George Santayana

346. “What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?”

— George Santayana

347. “I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.”

— George Santayana

348. “Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.”

— George Santayana

349. “To substitute judgments of fact for judgments of value is a sign of pedantic and borrowed criticism.”

— George Santayana

350. “Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.”

— George Santayana