George Santayana
An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.Collection: Art
When men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their reasons are always different.Collection: Women
It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.Collection: Patience
Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.Collection: Courage
Music is essentially useless, as is life.Collection: Music
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.Collection: Happiness
We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will be the past; and we must respect the past, remembering that it was once all that was humanly possible.Collection: Future
The dreamer can know no truth, not even about his dream, except by awaking out of it.Collection: Dreams
For a man who has done his natural duty, death is as natural as sleep.Collection: Death
Wisdom comes by disillusionment.Collection: Wisdom
Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.Collection: Intelligence
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.Collection: Death
The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.Collection: Experience
The family is one of nature's masterpieces.Collection: Nature
Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.Collection: Science
The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false philosophy.Collection: Wisdom
I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.Collection: Science
History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't there.Collection: History
Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it.Collection: Wisdom
A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one's life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted.Collection: Happiness
Friends are generally of the same sex, for when men and women agree, it is only in the conclusions; their reasons are always different.Collection: Women
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.Collection: Patriotism
To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.Collection: Nature
Only the dead have seen the end of the war.Collection: War
The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.Collection: Imagination
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.Collection: Friendship
Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors.Collection: Design
Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.Collection: History
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.Collection: Positive
Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.Collection: Happiness
Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.Collection: Knowledge
The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.Collection: Truth
The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.Collection: Age
Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.Collection: Friendship
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
Habit is stronger than reason.
Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings, without attaching them to events or objects in the world.
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot live without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character.
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.
It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.
It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.
All thought is naught but a footnote to Plato.
The Bible is literature, not dogma.
Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.