Top 400 George Santayana Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “It is one thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagination.”

— George Santayana

352. “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

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

— George Santayana

354. “Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.”

— George Santayana

355. “Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.”

— George Santayana

356. “Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.”

— George Santayana

357. “Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway.”

— George Santayana

358. “Love is at once more animal than friendship and more divine...”

— George Santayana

359. “It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.”

— George Santayana

360. “Man is as full of potential as he is of importance.”

— George Santayana

361. “Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.”

— George Santayana

362. “Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.”

— George Santayana

363. “Scepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer: there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.”

— George Santayana

364. “What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like?”

— George Santayana

365. “A friend’s only gift is himself.”

— George Santayana

366. “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

367. “Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.”

— George Santayana

368. “The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.”

— George Santayana

369. “A man’s memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.”

— George Santayana

370. “The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence.”

— George Santayana

371. “It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.”

— George Santayana

372. “The Bible is literature, not dogma.”

— George Santayana

373. “Experience is a mere whiff or rumble, produced by enormously complex and ill-deciphered causes of experience; and in the other direction, experience is a mere peephole through which glimpses come down to us of eternal things.”

— George Santayana

374. “Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.”

— George Santayana

375. “The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.”

— George Santayana

376. “Nietzsche said that the earth has been a madhouse long enough. Without contradicting him we might perhaps soften the expression, and say that philosophy has been long enough an asylum for enthusiasts.”

— George Santayana

377. “All beauties are to be honored, but only one embraced.”

— George Santayana

378. “Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.”

— George Santayana

379. “The degree in which a poet’s imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.”

— George Santayana

380. “The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign its total temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to superstition; and candor and a sense of justice are, in such a case, the first things lost.”

— George Santayana

381. “Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one’s fine feelings, on one’s indomitable optimism and trust in life.”

— George Santayana

382. “It is possible to be a master in false philosophy, easier, in fact, than to be a master in the truth, because a false philosophy can be made as simple and consistent as one pleases.”

— George Santayana

383. “Professional philosophers are usually only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study the case for which they are retained.”

— George Santayana

384. “Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginary fitness of its faith.”

— George Santayana

385. “If you prefer illusions to realities, it is only because all decent realities have eluded you and left you in the lurch; or else your contempt for the world is mere hypocrisy and funk.”

— George Santayana

386. “The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany.”

— George Santayana

387. “The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.”

— George Santayana

388. “Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.”

— George Santayana

389. “It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.”

— George Santayana

390. “Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.”

— George Santayana

391. “The man who is not permitted to own is owned.”

— George Santayana

392. “Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.”

— George Santayana

393. “Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.”

— George Santayana

394. “It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.”

— George Santayana

395. “All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man’s natural sentiment in the face of death.”

— George Santayana

396. “The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.”

— George Santayana

397. “To the uninitiated they have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave of the hand: What! are you still troubled by that? Or if compelled to be so scholastic as to labour the point they have explained, as usual, that oneself cannot be the absolute because the idea of oneself, to arise, must be contrasted with other ideas. Therefore, you cannot well have the idea of a world in which nothing appears but the idea of yourself.”

— George Santayana

398. “Philosophy may describe unreasoning, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.”

— George Santayana

399. “All language is rhetorical, and even the senses are poets.”

— George Santayana

400. “The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.”

— George Santayana