George Santayana
Skepticism is a discipline fit to purify the mind of prejudice and render it all the more apt, when the time comes, to believe and to act wisely.Collection: Believe
It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.Collection: Stupid
Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.Collection: Equilibrium
Man's most serious activity is play.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Philosophy
It is the acme of life to understand life.Collection: Life
The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms.Collection: Intelligent
A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world; and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.Collection: Play
Sex endows the individual with a dumb and powerful instinct, which carries his body and soul continually towards another, makes it one of the dearest employments of his life to select and pursue a companion, and joins to possession the keenest pleasure, to rivalry the fiercest rage, and to solicitude an eternal melancholy. What more could be needed to suffuse the world with the deepest meaning and beauty?Collection: Love
What brings enlightenment is experience, in the sad sense of this word--the pressure of hard facts and unintelligible troubles, making a man rub his eyes in his waking dream, and put two and two together. Enlightenment is cold water.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Progress
why shouldnt things be largely absurd, futile, and transitory? they are so, and we are so, and they and we go together.Collection: Together
Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.Collection: Character
Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.Collection: Fate
It is one thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just imagination.Collection: Heart
Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.Collection: Heart
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.Collection: Heart
A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.Collection: Spirituality
The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.Collection: Lying
Spirit itself is not human; it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?Collection: Spring
An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.Collection: Waiting
. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.Collection: Drama
Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.Collection: Long
A man’s feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.Collection: Country