Source: The Sense of Beauty
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Famous George Santayana Quotes
“A friend's only gift is himself.”
Source: The Life of Reason: Human Understanding
Source: The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings
“For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old fashioned”
“The quality of wit inspires more admiration than confidence”
Source: The Sense of Beauty
Source: The Life of Reason: Human Understanding
“Man has an inexhuastible faculty for lying, especially to himself.”
Source: The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense, Volume VII, Book One
“It is wisdom to believe the heart.”
Source: The complete poems of George Santayana: a critical edition
Source: Character and Opinion in the United States
Source: The Life of Reason Or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Religion, Volume VII, Book Three
Source: The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Society, Volume VII, Book Two
“The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.”
Source: The Life of Reason: Human Understanding
Source: Spinoza's Ethics and
“America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.”
Source: The letters of George Santayana
“There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
Source: The Works of George Santayana
“An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.”
Source: The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress
“Boston was a moral and intellectual nursery, always busy applying first principles to trifles.”
“There is no right government except good government.”
Source: Atoms of Thought: An Anthology of Thoughts
Source: The Works of George Santayana
“The best men in all ages keep classic traditions alive”
Source: The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings
“Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.”
Source: The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense, Volume VII, Book One
“Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.”
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
Source: Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy
Source: The Works of George Santayana
Source: The Life of Reason: Human Understanding
“Never have I enjoyed youth so thoroughly as I have in my old age”
Source: Persons and Places: My host the world
“Eternal vigilance is the price of knowledge.”
Source: The Essential Santayana: Selected Writings
“There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal.”
Source: The Life of Reason: Human Understanding
Source: The Works of George Santayana: Soliloquies in England and Later soliloquies
“Oaths are the fossils of piety.”
Source: Atoms of Thought: An Anthology of Thoughts
Source: The Works of George Santayana
Source: Little essays drawn from the writings of George Santayana
“Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.”
Source: Persons and Places
Source: The Sense of Beauty
Source: The Life of Reason: Human Understanding
“Beware of long arguments and long beards.”
Source: The Works of George Santayana
“Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition.”
Source: The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress
“It is a great bond to dislike the same things.”
Source: The letters of George Santayana
“Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists.”
Source: The Life of Reason: Human Understanding
“All beauties are to be honored, but only one embraced.”
Source: Persons and Places
“What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like?”
Source: Persons and Places
Source: The Works of George Santayana