George Santayana
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him.
Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.
It is always pleasant to be urged to do something on the ground that one can do it well.
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.
To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
America is a young country with an old mentality.
It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.
The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.
Emotion is primarily about nothing and much of it remains about nothing to the end.
If pain could have cured us we should long ago have been saved.
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.
The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty.
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
Wealth, religion, military victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.
Depression is rage spread thin.
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit.
The word experience is like a shrapnel shell, and bursts into a thousand meanings.
The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.
A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
Philosophers are very severe towards other philosophers because they expect too much.
Oxford, the paradise of dead philosophies.
That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief could be on so great a subject.
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.
Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour and possess what we mean. Knowledge is recognition of something absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace.
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.
A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.
A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.
Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
The Soul is the voice of the body's interests.
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
Life is not a spectacle or a feast; it is a predicament.
To know what people really think, pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say.
The wisest mind has something yet to learn.
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the older man who will not laugh is a fool.
Nonsense is so good only because common sense is so limited.
The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.
My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.
The highest form of vanity is love of fame.
In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.